Svietlanna ross

Svietlanna Ross is my story - a multidisciplinary artist and photographer who has been cultivating expression through every medium for 30 years. A way of breathing and living. Art in the gut and in the veins.

This artistic project was born during my burlesque years, through the art of unveiling, in the world of pin-ups. A way of reclaiming my body as a woman — scarred by life's experiences. It is a visual, aesthetic, colorful, raw work, reflecting the softness and the violence of the journey.

A desire to shed all the masks created as survival tools in the wake of wounds. Layer after layer. This project is the fruit of a transmutation, a transformation, an acceptance of complexes, flaws, judgments, and forgotten things. No longer fighting the shadow, but walking with it, carrying it into the light, and dancing with it.

Being a woman is being fire, empathetic, wild, hypersensitive, cyclical, gentle, selective, observant, connected to an invisible world of emotions, magic, and life.

Svietlanna — from "sviet", light, "lanna", the path, and "ross", red, the first chakra. The path of light through rootedness, through the full acceptance of my femininity. A name I once hid behind, thinking I had to conceal this part of myself. I am what I am — and I will no longer make myself smaller to make others comfortable.

Melissa Mancuso, Editor