Julia Soboleva

Julia Soboleva was born in 1990 into Latvia’s Russian minority, then watched the paperwork of belonging disappear when the country became independent in 1991. She left for the UK at eighteen and now works in Stoke-on-Trent. “These ideas made little sense to me,” she has said of cultural identity. “I turned to art to create my own definitions of ‘normal.’”

She was born on the cusp of the USSR’s collapse and Latvia’s rebirth, and she describes the childhood as unstable and unpredictable, which is a polite way of saying a child had to invent weather when the official one would not hold. Imagination did the navigating. “Maybe this is how surreal artists are made,” she muses. The pictures still carry taboo, trauma, ritual, and a kind of homemade magic, mixed from collage and paint because those were the materials on the table.

Southampton Solent University was the first British city: new culture, too much experiment, not enough sleep. Manchester School of Art and then the North were quieter and more industrial. Each city, she has said, shaped her differently. Parenthood arrived there, and with it a Masters in Illustration. The studio was a kitchen table after the child was down. Tutors helped her rebuild a method that could travel in a bag.

“My style is influenced by the circumstances of my life,” she explains. “I had to find a way to work outside time and space, using whatever materials were at hand.” No rented room, little time, an intuition that does not wait for a perfect plan. The blend of collage, painting, and whatever sat within reach was not a brand decision. It was how the night would allow the work to happen. She treats separate pictures as one ongoing piece. “It’s like all my individual artworks are one big piece of art,” she says. “A portal into another world I’ve discovered and have the privilege to unravel.”

That continuity is practical as well as private. A collage cut at midnight can sit beside a painted face made the following week, and she will still talk about them as rooms in the same house. In 2023 she gave half the profits from her Healing Can Begin print to the Red Cross Turkey-Syria Earthquake Appeal. The gesture fits the practice: a picture can be private and still do a public job. She has talked about art as a tool for collective action and healing, which sounds grand until you remember the print was sold from the same desk that starts after bedtime.

Southampton was the whirlwind. Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent were the quieter industrial years, the ones that made a kitchen table look like a reasonable studio. The donation did not change the method. It only proved the method could leave the kitchen. “It’s like being a gardener,” she says. “You tend to your mind, nurture it, and then—bam! Everything’s in blossom.” Start at the kitchen table. The strange will already be sitting in the familiar chair, waiting for you to notice it is not a guest.