By Kim Shaylor, Art Curator and Founder at Gone Rogue London, well known for curating contemporary art in unconventional spaces
There’s a quiet sort of rebellion happening in Tayisiya Shovgelia’s paintings. It’s not loud or performative — it’s the kind that comes from surviving, from deciding that silence no longer protects you. When I first came across her work, I wasn’t struck by the nudity or the symbolism, but by the emotional weight carried in the gestures of her figures – the way a hand hesitates and a face turns half toward light and half toward shadow.
Tayisiya’s art feels deeply personal, but it also speaks to something collective: the ongoing, universal tension between fragility and strength in the female experience. It’s about the body as both home and battlefield.
The Body That Remembers
When she says, “There is a lot of pain stored in my body,” it doesn’t feel like a metaphor. Her paintings show that truth -pain turned into colour, movement, and form. They carry what words can’t say.
In The Moment of Life, a woman’s masked face and a man’s tender-yet-controlling hand hang in uneasy balance. The composition doesn’t tell us what to think — it lets us feel that fine line between care and control. There’s protection and suffocation in the same touch.
Tayisiya paints these contradictions without resolving them. And it makes her work truly resonate: she doesn’t offer answers; she gives form to things most people would rather leave unspoken.
What Femininity Really Means
When asked what femininity means to her, Tayisiya’s answer stopped me for a moment. She said:
“Femininity is about allowing yourself to keep dreaming, striving, creating, and living fearlessly while being scared.”
That sentence alone feels like a manifesto. Her paintings carry that duality – the exhaustion and grace of surviving womanhood in a world that keeps testing it.
Her piece An Empty Space captures this so well: a stretched female body, exposed yet guarded, paired with a faceless red male figure. The red is anger, shame, fear – all the things women hold inside and carry quietly. It’s a haunting image, not because it shocks, but because it feels too familiar.
Tayisiya doesn’t romanticise trauma. She acknowledges it, reclaims it, and makes it visible. There’s immense courage in that.
“An Empty Space” by Tayisiya Shovgelia
Between Sensuality and Honesty
Winning Best Erotic Artist 2025 at Erotic Art London might suggest her work is provocative, but that word doesn’t quite fit. She once told me, “My work isn’t about provocation, it’s about honesty,” and she is right.
Her portrayal of the nude body isn’t about performance or decoration – it’s about truth. For her, eroticism is a form of exposure, and sensuality is about being fully present. Somewhere between those two, she finds a kind of emotional clarity.
There’s something deeply human in that space – the moment when emotion and skin meet, when being seen becomes both terrifying and liberating.
Turning Pain Into Beauty
Tayisiya’s canvases often look serene from a distance: warm tones, balanced compositions, almost classical light. But as you move closer, you notice the distortions — the body slightly off, the limbs blurred, the perspective uneasy.
She paints memory the way we actually experience it: imperfect, fluid, full of emotional residue. “Bodies distort like my memories with time,” she says. That distortion is not a stylistic choice but her way of telling the truth.
What I find powerful is how she turns that truth into something beautiful, without ever hiding the pain. The trauma remains visible, but it’s transformed into something that gives off warmth instead of despair. That transformation – from internal chaos to visual harmony – is what makes her art healing to look at.
There’s another side to her practice that’s harder to capture in still images – her performances. Watching Tayisiya paint live is a completely different experience. She doesn’t perform for an audience; she seems to dissolve into her work.
“I was born to be rebellious, but raised to be quiet,” she once said. That sentence explains her entire process. When she paints, she unlearns quietness. She dances, she talks to her canvas, she forgets to eat or sleep. It’s raw, vulnerable, and freeing.
During her collaborations with the jazz-electronic band Respair, the act of painting became inseparable from the rhythm and sound – it became a form of embodied storytelling. The focus shifted from the finished canvas to the experience of creation itself. Watching her paint is like watching someone breathe for the first time after holding it for too long.
Between Two Worlds
What Tayisiya does is more than personal healing. She gives shape to something many of us still can’t quite put into words – the silence that trauma leaves behind, the blur between softness and strength, the tug between wanting to be seen and fearing it.
In a time when art is often consumed quickly and discarded, her work asks for something slower: attention, empathy, honesty. It’s not just beautiful; it feels necessary.
When you stand before her paintings, you don’t feel like you’re looking at someone’s pain. You feel like you’re being quietly reminded of your own resilience.
Images courtesy of the artist — “The Moment of Life” and “An Empty Space”
Currently exhibited at The F Word, Firepit Art Gallery, London (October 2025 – January 2026)
You can find more works from Tayisiya Shovgelia on her website: https://tayisiya.art/works
