Women create life and beauty. Different kinds of women’s labour such as spinning, braiding, or weaving, were interpreted in mythology as mysterious actions that echo the cosmic process of creation. The artist Margarita Izotova reminds us of this deep symbolism. Her favourite technique is the archetypical “living thread”. In this context one can remember the three fates known as Moirae or Parcae and the thread of Ariadne.
     Margarita draws not with paints but with threads and fabrics. Formally her works can be defined as tapestries, however they are unparalleled. The artist uses materials of different texture: plant and artificial fibres, sometimes combining them with silk, kapron and acetate. Unbelievable richness in colour, striking collisions of living textures – you feel like you are in front of extraterrestrial stained-glass windows, pierced with an inscrutable light.
     “I don’t perceive a thread as a thread, a fabric as a fabric. They are for me colour-bearing alloys, some moving streams of light and shade,” says the artist. Margarita Izotova creates not a decorative textile and not a reflection of a real world. The trembling of her spiritual fire gives birth to some world parallel to ours. This world has its own rules and space which she calls “Arttheatre.” It is streaming with flames and ri ppling like a mirage.
     Margarita doesn’t make sketches, she just watches how the material, the “Living thread” behaves. When starting a work the artist never knows how she will finish it. “Sometimes threads thrown by accident on canvas give so beautiful combinations that the only thing I need to do is to attach them. However, this is not a rule but a case. I usually try on every hair, every tiny scrap many times,” tells Margarita.
     The “Spring” by Izotova consists of streams of energies. These streams are born in the far cosmos or in the clouds of the Cultural Universe, coiling in colourful spirals of thoughts. A woman lets streams of both light and dark pass through her, but she casts away all roughness as she must be a light pillar that links the Earth and the Sky. The world is seen by the artist as a lamb being breast fed by a woman.
     Izotova graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. Her works have been exhibited at more than 20 personal exhibitions in Russia and abroad, including exhibitions at the Marble Palace at the Dyagilev Centre of Arts in St. Petersburg (Russia), in the St. Petersburg Museum of the History of the City and the City’s Sculpture, in the State Museum of Arts in Ekaterinburg (Russia), at the Cultural Centre in Imatra (Finland), in the Create Centre Gallery in Bristol (UK) and at the New Hall of the Cambridge University (UK).
     All in all, the artist has over 40 tapestries; their total area is about 70 square meters. The works of Margarita Izotova can be found in museums of St. Petersburg and other cities and in private collections in the USA, Great Britain, New Zealand, Finland and Russia.