Mila is a multi disciplinarian artist with Slavic heritage born in Aotearoa, living on unceded Turrbal/Jagera country. Mila’s work stands at the meeting point of devotion and the occult. Working across clay, textile, watercolour and acrylic, she treats making as a form of prayer.

Drawing on religious iconography, occult practise and the devil’s kitchen, the work moves between the sacred and the profane without setting one against the other. Halos, altars, vessels and charms sit alongside rot, ruin and the slow work of decay, which appears here as part of a cycle rather than an ending. Light turns up where it’s least expected acting as a small flame held in the dark. The Mother returned to hold us in her embrace.

Divine inspiration is central to the practice. Ideas arrive as something received rather than invented, and the work is an act of answering. 

Entirely self-taught, Mila has built a lifetime of craft outside formal institutions, and that independence gives the work its direct rawness. 

Through the work, she invites viewers into that same space, to find something worth tending in the dark, and acts as an invitation to slow down and be. 

Each of her pieces is designed to bring a portal of the divine into the home, however small, and to encourage a deepening of spiritual practise and devotion, as a lantern in these times.