Biography
Lidziya Yablonskaya is a ceramics artist whose practice emerges at the intersection of personal experience, female symbolism and cultural memory.
She was born in 1976 in Polesia, a region of Eastern Europe also known as Europe's "secret Amazon", whose ancient wetlands have preserved folk traditions for centuries. This archaic environment shaped her sensitivity to to both tangible and intangible heritage.
Lidziya studied painting and graduated from the Pinsk School of Art, where she first began searching for a language to express perfection through imperfections. However, under family pressure, she gave up the idea of professional art education, choosing instead a path of economics, motherhood, and emigration to the United States.
For many years, she lived "in between": between dream and duty, family and ambition, Belarus and America, cultural memory and a new identity. Life in the U.S. intensified this inner divide.
Photography became her first tool for returning to herself — a way to capture the quiet intensity of ordinary life and the ache of transformation. Through the lens, Lidziya began to explore questions of identity, loss, and healing, turning emotion into image. Her black and white photographs are bold and visceral, filled with shadow and sensitivity. They hold stories of rupture and repair, echoing the tension between presence and absence, nature and memory.
Today, Lidziya lives and works in Washington State, using photography to trace emotional landscapes and explore the fragile balance between the personal and the collective — always seeking the raw, imperfect beauty that lies just beneath the surface.
Artist Statement
I am an artist of transitions and transformations.
My practice has grown between Belarus — where my roots lie — and the land of the Indigenous peoples of America, where my children are growing, and where I continue to unfold. I live in the space in between — in the liminality where trauma takes shape and memory becomes material.
My art follows the Heroine’s Journey.
I explore archetypes, initiations, and roles that women pass through: from birth to old age, from motherhood to solitude,
from body to spirit, from exile to return.
The woman in my work is a witness, a priestess, a memory keeper. She exists in light and shadow, in fragments and absences.
Through the lens, I collect stories that cannot be told in words — stories of rupture, of tenderness, of silent strength.
My photographs are emotional vessels. They hold grief and grace, identity and disintegration, the wildness of nature and the weight of memory. In black and white, I seek clarity — not perfection, but presence. Each image is a scar made visible, not as damage, but as testimony. Of resistance, of ecology, of healing.
My art is a ritual,
an act of remembrance,
an act of refusal to vanish —
where love, truth, and the self are revealed in contrast and grain.
Let’s Connect
I’d love to hear from you — whether you’re a curator, collector, fellow artist, or someone touched by my work.
Feel free to reach out with inquiries about exhibitions, collaborations, available works, or just to share a thought.
You can contact me directly via email at lidziyaya @ gmail.com or use the form here.
I personally read every message and will get back to you as soon as I can.
Thank you for being here.
— Lidziya
@_lidziya.ya_