How Mehriban Shamsadinskaya Turns Quiet Feelings into Paintings and Installations
In this interview for the Arts to Hearts Project, we sat down with Mehriban Shamsadinskaya — a multidisciplinary artist and art therapist from Baku, Azerbaijan — whose work spans painting, installations, fashion, and performance. She opens up about her creative path from childhood drawings to thought-provoking exhibitions and community projects.
Mehriban talks about how colour, memory, and emotion shape her work, why she moves between mediums, and how life experiences like living with bipolar disorder have shaped both her art and her role as a therapist. Through this conversation, we get a closer look at what drives her practice: curiosity, constant change, and a need to stay in tune with the world around her.
Mehriban Shamsadinskaya is a featured artist in our book, “101 ArtBook – Abstract Edition” You can explore her journey and the stories of other artists by purchasing the book here:
https://shop.artstoheartsproject.com/products/the-creative-process-book
Mehriban Shamsadinskaya (b. 1990, Baku, Azerbaijan) is a multidisciplinary artist and art therapist whose work bridges painting, installation, and conceptual performance. A member of the Union of Artists of Azerbaijan since 2009, she has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in emotional introspection, poetic memory, and symbolic colour. Shamsadinskaya holds a BA and MA in Art Studies from the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Arts, where she focused her research on the role of graphic design in advertising communications.
In 2013, she furthered her studies at Sotheby’s Institute of Art (London) and took courses at Central Saint Martins in life painting and textile design. Her doctoral dissertation explores ornamental traditions in contemporary Azerbaijani decorative-applied arts. Her artistic journey includes solo exhibitions such as Violet (2014), Turn (2021), and Mood (2023), as well as participation in numerous international exhibitions and interdisciplinary projects. She has spent the last five years leading therapeutic art programs as an art therapist, including installing the Tree of Happiness at the Mental Health Centre. She is also known for conceptual projects like Violet Power and Sea la Vie, exploring themes of inner voice, rebirth, and collective memory.
1. You’ve been creating since childhood—how has your creative voice evolved from those early days to now?
Since childhood, creativity has been my way of understanding the world. I began drawing when I was four — instinctively, joyfully — without knowing that art could carry weight, memory, and healing. My drawings were filled with dreams, fairy tales, and spontaneous colours in those early days. They were expressions of imagination, untouched by critique or theory. As I grew older, primarily through my academic journey and life experiences, my creative voice became more conscious, more layered. It began to reflect not just what I saw, but what I felt deeply and couldn’t always articulate with words.
The spontaneous joy of childhood gave way to a more nuanced exploration of emotion: of loss, resilience, rebirth, and the invisible threads that connect us to memory and time. While my techniques have matured and the conceptual depth has grown, I still try to preserve the intuitive spark of those early years — the sense of wonder, the raw honesty. Today, I see my work as a dialogue between my inner child and my present self: one brings curiosity, the other brings reflection. My creative voice has become a form of expression and witnessing of myself, the world around me, and of others who might see their own emotions mirrored in my work.
I believe the emotional and the social are deeply connected. Before anything becomes a headline or a statistic, it is a human feeling — grief, shame, displacement, fear, resilience.
Mehriban Shamsadinskaya
2. Your work spans painting, video art, installations, and fashion prints. What inspires you to explore so many different media?
The medium is never the starting point — it’s the response. Each idea, each emotional state, has its form of embodiment. Sometimes a painting can hold the silence I want to express; other times, only an installation or a video can carry the weight of a memory or the rhythm of a thought. I’m inspired by the richness of human emotion, by inner landscapes, by memory, by rituals, by colour as a psychological language. These inspirations don’t always fit into one format — they ask for movement, texture, space, or time.
That’s why I can move freely between painting, video, objects, textile, and even performance. Fashion prints, for example, were a way to bring art into everyday life — to let it live beyond the canvas, to touch people differently. Installations allow me to create environments, to invite viewers inside the emotion rather than observe it. Video art gives me time as a medium, where pacing, breath, and sequence can speak. Ultimately, I don’t see mediums as separate. They’re threads in one larger practice — a practice rooted in emotional truth, transformation, and the desire to communicate what often goes unspoken.
3. Many of your paintings are described as full of femininity, charm, and emotion—what stories or feelings do you hope viewers take away?
Femininity, for me, is not a style — it’s a force. It’s intuition, softness paired with strength, vulnerability that coexists with power. I feel seen when people describe my paintings as full of femininity and emotion, because that’s what I consciously and unconsciously carry into every work. The stories I hope viewers take away are not always literal — they’re emotional stories. A quiet inner shift, a memory they’d forgotten, a sudden warmth, or even a sense of being held.
My work often speaks in the language of colour and gesture, inviting the viewer to feel before they understand. My paintings usually have a delicate tension between fragility and resilience, melancholy and light. I want people, especially women, to feel reflected and safe, like they’ve found a mirror that doesn’t judge, only listens. Sometimes it’s a story of healing. Sometimes it’s about beauty in imperfection. Sometimes it’s a bouquet that blooms despite grief. What I want most is for my art to offer a pause-a breath—in someone’s day. And in that pause, to feel something real, gentle, and human.
4. How has your academic journey, including your time at Central Saint Martins and Sotheby’s, shaped your creative practice?
My academic journey has been both a foundation and a catalyst. Studying at the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Arts gave me a solid base in theory, composition, and design history. It also introduced me to the intellectual discipline behind visual culture — how meaning is constructed, how symbols evolve, and how ornament, especially in Azerbaijani art, carries cultural memory. That foundation continues to shape how I approach form and meaning. However, my time at Central Saint Martins and Sotheby’s Institute of Art opened something new: a global perspective and experimental freedom. At Central Saint Martins, I wasn’t just painting — I was encouraged to question why I paint, to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas of beauty, identity, and narrative.
It was a space of bold risk-taking, where I learned that failure is part of the creative process. At Sotheby’s, I stepped into contemporary art with new eyes. I was surrounded by dialogue — critical, curatorial, and conceptual. I began to understand how artworks exist in a larger ecosystem: how they speak to audiences, how they are read, placed, and remembered. It gave me the language and confidence to articulate my vision as a painter, a multidisciplinary artist, and thinker. These experiences didn’t change my voice; they helped me hear it more clearly.
5. You’ve tackled powerful themes like solitude, societal blindness, and national memory. How do you approach blending social commentary with art?
For me, art is not just a personal act — it’s a form of witnessing. When I explore themes like solitude, societal blindness, or national memory, I don’t approach them as distant concepts. I approach them as lived experiences — mine and those around me. I believe the emotional and the social are deeply connected. Before anything becomes a headline or a statistic, it is a human feeling — grief, shame, displacement, fear, resilience. My process begins with observation and empathy. I often start by asking: What is not being said? What are we afraid to look at? Sometimes, there is a silence in society, like the unspoken wounds of history or how we isolate those struggling.
I try to make that silence visible — not through direct provocation, but through symbolism, colour, texture, and space. Rather than offering answers, I create spaces where reflection can happen. I don’t want to preach — I want to open a door, to hold up a mirror. Whether it’s a painting charged with inner tension or an installation that feels like a psychological landscape, I want the viewer to pause and feel something they may not have words for. Blending social commentary with art is about staying truthful to the world and myself. My goal is not to document or decorate, but to invite transformation: quiet, sometimes uncomfortable, but always sincere.
6. What motivates you to keep pushing creative boundaries and starting new, challenging projects?
What keeps me motivated is a kind of inner restlessness — not in a chaotic sense, but in a profoundly human one. I believe that as long as I’m alive, I’m evolving, so my art must evolve too. I don’t see creativity as a fixed identity; it’s a dialogue with time, the world, and myself. And that dialogue is constantly changing. I also long to understand more, feel deeper, and express what words alone cannot carry. Art gives me a way to explore the unspoken. And every new project is like stepping into unknown emotional territory — unfamiliar, sometimes uncomfortable, but necessary. I’m also deeply inspired by transformation, both personal and collective.
Challenging projects push me to stretch my language, to risk vulnerability, and to stay awake. I never want to repeat myself just because it’s safe. I want my work to be alive, to have questions, not just answers. And finally, it’s the connection with others — when someone tells me a painting helped them feel something they couldn’t name, or when an installation echoes a collective truth — those moments remind me why I create. They keep me going, even when it’s hard. Art, for me, is not just what I do. It’s how I stay honest. And that honesty constantly invites me to go further.
Mehriban Shamsadinskaya’s work uses colour, gesture, and space to explore emotion, memory, and the quiet things people often carry inside. Her journey shows how creativity can evolve with time and help make sense of experiences that are hard to put into words.
Through painting, installations, and therapy, she’s found a way to connect with others by staying close to what feels real. From her early days drawing fairy tales to leading community art programs, her path reminds us that making art can be a way to listen to ourselves and each other.
To learn more about Mehriban, click the following links to visit her profile.
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