A SQUIRREL´S OPINION ON POETRY

With his first conceptual series, however, Ilya steps into photography not as an auxiliary craft but as an expressive language in its own right. He describes this shift as a revelation: photography allows him to articulate moods, ironies, and fleeting visions that painting cannot always hold. It becomes a parallel world—one more immediate, unpredictable, and, in this case, delightfully mischievous.

His love of art, deeply tied to the emotional and cultural layers of lived experience, underpins all of this: “Art is history told through feelings,” he says, and his images embody that belief. Ilya’s debut series—A Squirrel’s Opinion on Poetry—is an imaginative, ironic, and carefully staged visual tale that merges set design, puppetry, forest folklore, and the material history of writing.

What draws you to the arts?

Art is like a second, separate world — a life we live through. And we live it, as if playing a role in the spirit of Stanislavski’s system. Every political gesture or cultural discovery influences art — and later, entire generations. It’s fascinating to observe how events have shaped you in the process of creating something — or when writing an essay about an old film that now feels completely different than it did decades ago.

Art is history told through feelings.

What did you like best about this photography project?

Poetry — food for squirrels? Scientists are still unsure what colours and shapes these fluffy rodents perceive the world in. But what if they see it through poetic imagery? Squirrels — whether wild or accustomed to humans — always appear unexpectedly. They’re as elusive as lines of magical poetry. One day, returning from a photo walk, I suddenly thought: it’s been a long time since I last saw squirrels in our forest. Could they have vanished? The thought made me sad, so I tried to distract myself by recalling my favourite verses. At that very moment, I turned my head — and saw a real, large squirrel sitting on a stump. Hardly believing my eyes, I dropped my bag of lenses and grabbed my smartphone. I switched on the video — and chased after her, determined to capture her every move. I ran after her, she ran from me. We leapt from tree to tree, while my bag lay forgotten in the grass…

What we see in these photographs exists somewhere between narrative illustration, conceptual still life, and theatrical play.

The series unfolds across two locations. In the forest, Ilya constructs miniature scenes using branches, a hollow marked by a postage stamp, soft natural light, and subtle interventions that feel almost like clues in a fable. Indoors, he turns to a rare taxidermy squirrel, placing it among retro ephemera: 1970s USSR stamps, metal nib pens, vintage ink jars, and old engravings whose surfaces he illuminates with shafts of light filtered through coloured glass. These choices give the photographs a distinctly analogue, nostalgic aura—part museum cabinet, part dream.

To create the series, Ilya uses a 0.45 wide-angle macro lens for texture and depth, and a 180° fisheye lens to distort the forest into a swirling, all-encompassing stage. The result is a surreal universe where squirrels ponder poetry, where ink glows like stained glass, and where objects appear charged with secret literary histories.

At the heart of the project is an anecdote that feels like a short story: returning from a photo walk and worrying about the disappearance of squirrels from his local forest, Ilya suddenly encountered one—a living, breathing creature, perched on a stump as if to reassure him. Startled and euphoric, he chased it with his phone camera, tripping over his own equipment bag, leaping from tree to tree in an impromptu duet of photographer and muse. That moment of wonder—comic, sincere, and touched by magic—sparked the conceptual series that followed.

In Ilya’s world, squirrels become fleeting carriers of meaning: elusive, whimsical, and as unpredictable as the best poetic lines. Through them, he imagines how animals might perceive literature, colour, or metaphor—and how art can reshape even the most ordinary woodland encounter.

Behind the humour of this series, behind the playful staging, lies genuine artistic inquiry—a search for moments when imagination slips into the everyday and turns it into story.