Biography
Natalia Semenova (b. 1997, Tolyatti, Russia) is a contemporary textile artist living and working in Tbilisi, Georgia. She studied at the Penza Art College and at the Department of Textile Art of the Saint Petersburg State Academy of Art and Design named after A. L. Stieglitz, where weaving became her primary medium. In parallel, she worked as a production designer in theater and film, which fostered her interest in installation and spatial practices.
Natalia’s works have been presented at the Contemporary Art Department of the Tolyatti Art Museum (2022, 2023). In 2022, she completed a large-scale public art installation as part of a project initiated by the Pushkin Museum in Saint Petersburg. Her works are held in private collections in Russia, as well as in the collection of the Stieglitz Academy.
Artist Statement
Natalia is a textile artist whose practice unfolds along two interconnected lines: intimate, wall-based textile works and interventions in urban space—public art and site-specific textile installations, including projects realized outside institutional frameworks. Moving between small-scale formats and large spatial gestures, her work establishes different modes of perception, ranging from focused, attentive viewing to a bodily experience of being inside a structure.
At the core of Natalia’s artistic inquiry are states of waiting and processes of transformation, unfolding both within individual experience and in the surrounding environment. In her practice, weaving becomes a meditative way of inhabiting these shifts: repetitive manual gestures translate lived experience into a language of simple forms, rhythms, colors, and symbols. Her use of construction netting—a signifier of impending renovation—directs attention to the condition of waiting itself, a moment in which transformation remains unfinished and open.
Responding to a contemporary reality shaped by instability and the erosion of familiar reference points, Natalia’s work proposes an alternative way of engaging with change. Rather than focusing on outcomes, she foregrounds the experience of transition as a meaningful state, inviting the viewer to slow down and sense transformation as a space where new relationships to time and environment can take shape.