Ekaterina Adelskaya

About

Ekaterina Adelskaya (b. 1988, Moscow) is a London-based artist with Russian-Ukrainian roots.

Her practice explores the interplay between memory, materiality and transformative processes. Working with a diverse range of materials, including biomaterials, metals, cardboard, pigments, and found objects, she pushes them to their physical limits.

Fire, heat, and cooking methods recur as primary alchemical techniques within her work. Adelskaya manipulates surfaces through melting, oxidising, and piercing, preserving the traces of these interventions. Rather than erasing material’s past, she allows its scars, wear, and imprints of time to remain partially visible – offering the viewer a chance to fathom what is seen and what remains hidden. 

In her ongoing research on potatoes, Ekaterina studies their sprouting stages and surface textures through 3D scanning data, while also experimenting with biomaterials made from potato starch. For her, the potato is both an evocative echo of childhood and an evolving subject of exploration.

In her degree work, A Home That Shifts, the sculptural installation extends across both vertical and horizontal axes. Exposed wooden wall studs reveal the warm yellow tones of timber – an architectural skeleton. Four black rectangular panels are filled with fissured, white potato starch-based biomaterial. The cracking process has stopped, leaving behind negative spaces reminiscent of root-like forms.

In this work, Ekaterina reflects on both the present and the past, her home in London and memories of her mother, who was constantly cooking in a post-Soviet domestic environment where potatoes held a central role in everyday cuisine.

Time and place are fused in a surreal manner, balancing between the real and the illusionary, where love and loss coexist.

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Ekaterina holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art with First Class Honours from the University of Hertfordshire (in partnership with the British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow, 2019) and is completing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (2025).