My Secret Garden, 2025

Dasha Pogodina   Best sellers Emerging artists

In My Secret Garden, the artist reflects on intimacy as a hidden inner landscape where tenderness, imagination, and vulnerability coexist. The work suggests a personal sanctuary — a symbolic space where one can withdraw from external expectations and reconnect with instinct, desire, and emotional truth. Here, the garden becomes a metaphor for a protected realm of inner life, where trust and quiet affection allow the self to unfold freely.

The painting speaks about the importance of preserving a private emotional territory that cannot be fully accessed by others. Within this intimate environment, beauty and sensitivity become acts of quiet resistance, reminding the viewer that personal freedom and authenticity often grow in the most carefully guarded spaces of the human soul.

PERICHORESIS SERIES 

“Perichoresis" (ancient Greek περιχώρησις - “interpenetration"), a theological term meaning the mutual penetration of divine parts into each other, to describe a unique union that does not imply mixing or merging, but emphasizes an indivisible unity.

Daria explores the theme of new sexuality, deliberately choosing a term from theological treatises for her series of works.

With this gesture, she protests against the dictates of religion, the church's manipulation and pessimization of human sexual manifestations and physicality, the false meanings and concepts with which religions have burdened, and instead of building true connections and bridges for man and God, they build walls.

“Perichoresis" for her is a beautiful and complex term that describes the fusion of the divine and the material. Having grown up in the Protestant tradition within an Orthodox society, Daria notes the common separation of sexuality from divinity in all these religions, while she sees sexuality as the clearest manifestation of divinity, beauty, and sublimity.

The artist notes that Christian culture has invested the image of the female body with a narrative of pornographic tension, while at the same time presenting paradise before the Fall as a sexual paradise, the Garden of earthly pleasures. For the artist, sexual paradise is a safe environment, complete trust, acceptance, the opportunity to open up and discover the Other, the opportunity to learn to be loved and to love.

Love is an environment where merging does not dissolve in another person, but on the contrary, strengthens the individuality of each and enriches each other.

Thus, the artist reminds that the division into the sublime and the low in love is artificial, and overcoming this division can make life more beautiful. The heroes of her paintings are immersed in the enigmatic space of love, and sometimes there are ironic scenes that balance the degree of sublimity.