Volchkova was born in
Tver,
Russia, in 1970, in the former
Soviet Union. Many of her relatives were collectivized subsistence farmers living in villages outside of the city, and across the seasons she would leave the city to farm, garden, and forage for berries and mushrooms with them. She developed a sympathy with nature that would influence her later art. As a child she went to math school, and studied piano for eight years in music school. As an adult in Tver she studied chemistry and art, taking degrees in
art restoration and Icon painting.
The Grabar Institute certified her as a second-degree Oil Painting restorer. She worked as a conservator and curator in the Tver Oblast Art Gallery, and joined a journeyman team of important early post-Soviet
iconostasis painters and restorers. Since she played a role in the Icon revival, her secular work could be considered a branch of that tradition. In 2000 she moved to Eugene, Oregon. She studied ceramics and figure sculpture at the
University of Oregon, and her work became a small sensation in Eugene's wood-fired ceramics movement. She became involved in concluding work in a research project initiated by architect
Christopher Alexander. In 2002 she began to study at the world-renowned
Pilchuck Glass School, where she discovered cast glass. One of her first pieces was selected as the only cast glass work for Pilchuck's live auction, Passion Afire, of emerging glass artists, held at the
Experience Music Project in
Seattle. Within a year, Pilchuck also selected her work for their annual live auction, in the company of some of the world's most famous glass artists. In 2003, she co-founded a non-profit dance institute, The Tango Center, and became its art director. She managed the hall's interior design and construction, but also sang Russian Tangos with the house band, and improvised Argentine Tango, the dance, with various partners in front of live audiences. In 2005 Volchkova left the US to adjust her immigration status. In the atmosphere of the Bush administration, the adjustment was repeatedly delayed and denied, making for a total of five years in exile. In 2013 she appeared on the cover of
Crime & the City Solution's album
American Twilight. She also played the central figure in music videos released by
Mute Records for the album, created by
Danielle de Picciotto. Her latest major series of paintings, original icons known as the 'Garden Saints', were part of two Art exhibitions in Berlin, and two in Hamburg, in 2012 and 2013. These are based on her experience as a gardener, landscape designer, and farmer, and inspired by research on the history of human-plant interaction. The icon series includes over a hundred plant canonizations, nineteen of which were exhibited from 2015 to 2016 at the
University of Oregon's
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. In 2016, the "Rose and Chocolate" Icon from this series became the album cover of "Unity" from the
Potomak label of
Einstürzende Neubauten. Art publisher
Pomegranate released notecards of the Garden Saints, and a calendar in 2018. Volchkova occasionally teaches Icon painting at the University of Oregon's Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and she is the topic of research projects. A public television segment on her work was nominated for a 2016 Emmy award. In 2022 she exhibited at the Schneider Museum of Art at
Southern Oregon University. In 2023 two of her icons were included in a history of art and plants, published in four languages by
Taschen books, entitled 'Plant Magick'. In 2023-24 she has a solo exhibition at
The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis. ==References==