Daughter of the renowned glass artist Vladimir Kotov, Olesya Kot spent a lot of time at her father’s workplace at Dyatkovo Crystal Factory as a kid. There she would pore over her father’s sketches and play with glass figurines. ‘Glass is a special, magical material’, says Olesya. ‘Anyone who falls in love with it stays true to it for the entire life. Colour, light, fragility, transparency, matte effects, shadow play, reflections – all the amazing qualities of this unique medium never fail to mesmerise’.

Olesya Kot has devised her own trademark method: she is the only artist in Russia to create sculptures out of several layers of plate glass without laser cutting. Speaking about the origins and unique features of her vision, Olesya explains, ‘One day I had an idea to craft a sculpture that would represent the void, akin to a burst soap bubble, tracing its outline with material – in this case, transparent glass. Inside this void I wanted to place three-dimensional objects that would be visible through the thick transparent mass. The methods of plate glass coldworking gave me the opportunity to create 3D sculptures that are interesting to examine from all sides’.

This representation of the void with the aid of glass takes us back to the basics – the archetypal concept of everything appearing out of nothing. At the same time, the artist’s idea recalls the unfathomable depths of the outer space and the cosmic voids. The latter, constituting some of the largest-scale natural structures, occupy the bulk of space in the universe. According to an astronomic study from 2014, cosmic voids, also known as dark space, contain the largest accumulations of dark energy.

The material used is just as archetypal as the subject of the void. During the dominance of the Gothic style, mediaeval church-goers would marvel at the world being transformed by stained glass. Flooding the space of the church, brightly coloured light transfigured its interior, members of the congregation, and reality itself. Characteristically of the period, the metaphysical and the physical amalgamated at this instant: having passed through manmade glass, sunbeams turned into divine light – a true miracle of human creation. Contemplation of this metamorphosis profoundly shocked the people of that epoch, and this experience seems to have been ingrained in our genetic memory. A similar ‘transparent world’ magic is what Olesya Kot strives to conjure in our days. By the way, her Gothic piece became part of Erarta Museum’s permanent collection display, while yet another glass sculpture, Homage, was featured in the 2023 Erarta Prize exhibition.

Olesya Kot was born in Leningrad in 1967. In 1985, she graduated from the Design Department of the Valentin Serov Leningrad Art College and went on to complete her studies at the Pottery and Glass Art Department of the Vera Mukhina Leningrad Higher School of Art and Design in 1991. She joined the Artists’ Union of Russia in 2018. The artist’s works were acquired for the collections of the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, State Russian Museum, and Glass Art Museum in St. Petersburg, as well as by private collectors.