In Darya Hancharka’s creative practice, she explores ideas about how landscape can be conceived, perceived, depicted, and understood in contemporary painting. The artists perceives the notion of „landscape” not as a fixed image, but as a dynamic phenomenon—a process, a transformation of preparation. In this sense, her canvases are closer to a laboratory, where the landscape ceases to be an object of depiction and instead becomes a methodology, a way to understand how forms are created. The painting does not emerge from a premeditated idea but is born through the interaction of paint, texture, and gesture. It is a focus on process rather than representation, a kind of visual fixation of a transitional state, where concepts of nature balance between possibility and embodiment, which Darya finds very important.

During the residency, drawing in a natural environment as well as the act of drawing itself become important methods in the painting practice. They allow for the exploration of the material’s potential as well as the attempt to establish a connection with the place, which is essential to the process.

Working en plein air allows one to draw a parallel between the painting process and the natural processes of formation in nature. It is painting about the process, containing the idea of painterly transformation – an understanding of painting as a metalanguage. Painting about painting.