Masha Luch
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11, 2025
- 5 min read
Masha Luch is a multidisciplinary artist from Russia, based in Montenegro. Her work includes textile art, sculpture, installation, and digital media. Before turning fully to art, she studied fashion design. That experience still shapes how she looks at materials and structure. Projects such as “SIGN” and “Last Price” show her interest in coded gestures, surfaces that change with light, and meanings that appear only with time or attention. Today her work connects design thinking with contemporary art practice.
Q: Your work often turns small gestures or invisible things into meaning. What draws you to those hidden layers?
A: Encoding meanings into near-invisible gestures is how I mark my presence within a vast, almost cosmic environment. I’m drawn to acting delicately without disturbing the natural flow of things — dispersing fine hints and traces. It’s my way of acknowledging myself as a tiny unit within a larger current and of claiming a right to belong.
Touching on the theme of the “little person,” I connect with Chekhov’s tension in what remains unsaid and with Tarkovsky’s silence and slowed time. They taught me not to fear the almost invisible, because that is where depth emerges. Subtle gestures feel intimate, almost sacred; they let us slow down and read meaning layer by layer.
I’m interested in a mode of presence that reveals itself only when the viewer is ready to meet it. In “SIGN” (public art / optical performance, 2025, Podgorica), that idea becomes literal: a word that surfaces only when rain begins. When the city’s outlines lose their sharpness and everything slows under the weight of rain, the word appears on the wet asphalt — a quiet, almost imperceptible presence and an invitation to dialogue. The text is not an announcement but a quiet reply that arrives when it’s needed most. The piece exists between the visible and the latent.
These hidden things don’t shout; they speak in a whisper to anyone willing to pause and listen. And for the one who discovers the cipher, a small gesture gains depth and volume.
Q: You’ve moved from fashion into art. What stayed with you from that world?
A: A love of minimalism, freedom with materials, and a systemic, investigative way of thinking. This lens took shape at university: my professors often noted a slight distance and irony in how I approached fashion, so my collections were frequently compared to art projects. Even then I was more interested in constructing a system of meaning than in crafting a stylised reality.
I value what the industry taught me: the habit of observing patterns of behaviour, understanding markets, and reading social context. That way of seeing has stayed with me and often acts as a structural spine across projects. For example, my artist’s book “Last Price” grew from research into fast fashion as the system seen through its speeds, cycles, connections, and signals.
My passion for prototyping and developing new technical solutions, combined with an emerging interest in minimalism — both technological and visual — defined that period. I could spend hours resolving constraints; the possibility of assembling a complex form in a single movement, with one seam, was mesmerising. Discoveries I hadn’t encountered before became values in their own right.
That engineering-inventive approach has carried over from fashion into my art practice. It shows up in my work with materials, in a love of technical problem-solving, and in a freedom with form.
Q: Camouflage and disguise appear often in your pieces. What do they mean to you now?
A: Camouflage and disguise for me are an ethic and a working model of identity. They’re about choosing how much to reveal while keeping one’s own boundaries intact. I blend in to leave a trace that only an attentive gaze will read. Disguise allows me to remain safe while preserving vulnerability and privacy. Camouflage is also a language of the environment: material and surface calibrate to context — architecture, interiors, the city, the digital plane. So the work operates from within the situation rather than sitting on top of it. I care about layering and reversibility — details that appear with shifts of light, angle, or distance. I’m interested in navigating attention: how to set the viewer’s path and create a mode of access to meaning, so the encounter happens by mutual consent, at the right moment and depth. That’s why camouflage and disguise in my practice are ways to be present quietly, to respect the site and the viewer, to hold a quiet presence, and to pass the right of discovery to those who are ready to see.
Q: Textile still feels central in your practice. What makes fabric such a powerful language for you?
A: Textile is my ground. Most often, the first thing my hand and mind reach for is fabric. My professional past shaped my way of seeing: looking at the world through a textile lens feels natural to me. It’s also a supple medium that enters into dialogue easily: in an installation it can serve as both backdrop and leading voice; it can carry video and projection, become graphic, texture, or pattern. That range makes fabric my primary language — flexible and multilayered.
There was a period of “separation” when I tried to step away from my design background, start from a blank slate, and move beyond cloth. No matter how I resisted, I kept returning to textile. At some point I accepted a simple truth: you cannot deny your own history; without it there is no future. Textile is a language I’m truly fluent in. That’s why it remains central in my practice.
Q: You work across sculpture, video, and digital forms. How do you decide what each idea needs?
A: I don’t choose a medium for an idea; on the contrary, the idea arrives with its form. It may sound almost like magic, but in practice it’s very grounded. I am the conduit, the adaptor between a concept and its making.
My ideas don’t emerge apart from material; they set parameters from the start — form, scale, whether light, movement, or sound are needed — and from there it becomes an object, an installation, a video, or something else. This is possible because I deliberately stay open to different materials and technologies and keep a live curiosity. I learn new tools and don’t drop an idea just because I can’t realise it technically yet. If I can’t today, I study until I find a way. That gives the idea the freedom to speak in its own language.
Q: Do you see intuition as part of your method, or more as something that takes over when you let it?
A: I understand intuition as an accumulation of experience. It isn’t something that strikes from the outside, but a background process constantly cross-referencing circumstances, impressions, and emotions. When the conditions align — context, timing, a line of thought — images seem to surface suddenly. In fact, that moment is the outcome of continuous internal analysis.
In those situations I give intuition room: I relax and read what the internal mechanism has already done. So there’s no real opposition for me: intuition is both a tuned instrument and something I trust to manifest at the right moment.
