Alla Goniodsky is a Russian-born stage designer, puppet-maker, painter and sculptor. After studying at the State Academy of Art and the St. Petersburg Theatrical Academy, she enjoyed a successful career as a theatrical designer. Now residing in the Pacific Northwest, she is a full-time artist and private art instructor. Her work blends an antique, almost Victorian sensibility, with hints of dramatic Russian theatre, quirky humor, and the misty aesthetic of memory. “My work aims to evoke a sensation of wonder and vision of the miraculous. I try to create a feeling of looking through theatre binoculars at the hidden underpinnings of the world and reveal what we normally overlook.” Inspired by her production work in the theatre, Goniodsky often expands her two-dimensional paintings and drawings into sculptural forms, as if the characters of her imagination are coming to life. She primarily sculpts with clay, transferring the shape into a plaster mold and then creating the final sculpture out of papier-mâché. Goniodsky skillfully uses paint, wax, and other media to create surfaces that don't conform to the traditional expectations of the medium. Goniodsky's most recent body of abstract paintings, In Between, explores liminal spaces in her memories - the borders between dream and wakefulness, concrete and abstract, known and unknown. Expanding upon the narrative works she is known for, these deeply emotional and atmospheric oil paintings evoke hazy remembrances of landscapes from the past, leaving room for the viewer to connect to their own personal narrative.