Julia Stotskaya works at the point where astronomy tips into folklore. Her drawings begin as observation — the geometry of an eclipse, the arc of a meteor shower, the slow choreography of sun and moon — and end somewhere closer to myth, where a fingertip can hold a star and an eye can read the sky like a page.
The works on view are built from a restricted, almost liturgical vocabulary — dense fields of dots, radiating lines, concentric rings, a recurring solar face whose features dissolve into pattern the longer one looks. Rendered in deep indigo against white, the drawings recall woodcuts and folk almanacs as much as scientific diagrams: hand-lettered notes drift across the compositions like marginalia, dates and observations inscribed directly onto the image, blurring the line between artwork and astronomical record.
This tension — between the precision of the eclipse's calendar and the intuitive, almost ritual quality of the mark-making — runs through the whole body of work. Stars become both data points and decoration; the sun's corona reads simultaneously as scientific illustration and as eyelash, as ornament, as gesture. Comets streak across the compositions the way they do across a night sky: briefly, insistently, gone before the eye can fully hold them.
In choosing Stotskaya as its first artist, Gridchin Studio sets out its intention for the programme ahead — work that is intimate in scale and hand, but oriented toward something much larger than itself.