Daria Shipukhina

Mixed Media Artist

Before the mark, there is the material. Before the image, there is the surface. Daria Shipukhina’s practice begins where most painters stop looking.

Trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, she brings to painting a discipline rooted in structure, material logic and the relationship between form and space. That training never left — it simply shifted from buildings to canvas, from technical drawing to charcoal, from construction to layered composition.
The subject is nature — not as spectacle, but as structure. Landscapes, botanical forms, the cycles of growth and decay: these are not painted from observation alone but reconstructed from physical memory, from the experience of moving through a place and carrying it back to the studio.
What interests Shipukhina is the threshold — the moment before concealment, the form that exists between states. Nature pushed beyond its own tolerance: disrupted, displaced, searching for new shapes rooted in its ancient origins. The work asks not what nature looks like, but what it becomes when forced to find itself again.
Shipukhina works with layered, synthetic compositions built from materials that carry the physical memory of the natural world they depict — raw pigments, charcoal, ink, plaster, coal and clay applied to pre-prepared surfaces. Thin washes and viscous textures build strata-like surfaces. Wet ink released onto pre-wetted paper follows its own logic. Torn tissue, translucent as petals, layers depth through chance. Her practice crosses between painting and printmaking — hand printing and chine collé allow the most fragile marks to hold. These are not decorative choices — each material is selected for what it does, not how it looks.
Trained as an architect, Shipukhina brings to painting a precise attention to line — its density, its weight, its capacity to define space and imply movement simultaneously. Where architecture uses line to contain, here line is released: structural yet expressive, a foundation that continuously tests its own limits.
Spontaneity is not accidental — it is structural. Shipukhina sets up conditions in which the material is free to make decisions: ink that finds its own course, pigment that blooms beyond the brush, surfaces that resist and yield in equal measure. The role of the artist is to create the conditions for the unexpected, then to know when to stop.
Drawing and painting converge here into something that resists easy categorisation — works that are built through accumulation, erasure and chance in equal measure. Each surface holds the evidence of every decision made and unmade. The line between control and surrender is where the work lives.

Projects

Sea and Rocks

Nature's Cycles

Lucence

Florals

Installations

Urban Experiments

Infinite Loop