Fergul Sharky (2015)

Art Parasites featured an illustration of mine in October. It had already been getting a lot of attention on Tumblr, but I was especially excited because I love all the work that gets featured on Art Parasites and it is so amazing to be on a platform with all these other artists. The great thing about posting artwork online is that it’s possible to show your work to people and view other artists’ work from around the world instantly. Without it I wouldn’t really know where to put my art, I don’t feel like you can just walk into a gallery and demand to be exhibited like you can these visually focused networks like Instagram or Tumblr.

Art Parasites is one of those great platforms for exposing work like mine and connecting me to likeminded people and artists. After being featured I actually flew out to Berlin and met one of the people behind the Art Parasites page and it was so good to connect the online art world with reality.

Houseboat shark mural

Since then I’ve been continuing to connect the online art world and my reality, mainly collaborating with other artists (some that I met online) and doing some commissions.

I was actually commissioned to paint a shark mural inside a houseboat in London which really pushed me out of my comfort zone.

It was fun to be ‘the shark lady’ for a while but really it was a one-off illustration and I’m keen to focus on the themes of emotional well-being, nature and perception in new ways as I progress an artist.

Water And Blood cover

Recently I collaborated with poet Andrea Grieb on a zine called Water and Blood, which is half poetry and half illustration. It was an amazing process to work with someone else’s work that intimately and there’s still so much to be said for the art of physically printing something. We’re now working on our second zine, which has become such a freeing and supportive creative relationship for us and I hope to make more of those in future.

How All-Consuming Is This, The Nature of Existence (2014).

Galina is a visual artist from West Yorkshire, living and working in London. She is currently completing a joint honours degree in Literature with Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, which enables her to
ignore the impending doom of a career as an artist. Her work is heavily influenced by her own experiences and concerns with the human condition, with a focus on emotional wellbeing and perception of the self. She is also attracted to themes of nature and primarily works in ink and pencil.

A collaborative zine with poet Andrea Grieb entitled Water and Blood was released in March 2016 and is available to buy online at galina.bigcartel.com.

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