Art & Craft News explores contemporary art perception through the practice of Khulkar Yunusova, a contemporary artist working under the name Stella Polare. Born in Tashkent and now living and working in France, she develops her artistic language at the intersection of cultures, languages, personal states, and ways of seeing. Her approach begins with a deceptively simple distinction: a viewer sees a form, while the artist is interested in what happens inside the person encountering that form. This shift moves attention away from the artwork as a fixed object and toward the experience created between artwork and viewer. In Stella Polare’s practice, contemporary art perception is therefore not based on discovering one correct interpretation. The same image can become memory, anxiety, silence, or something entirely different depending on who looks at it and what that person brings to the encounter. Art continues beyond the physical object through the internal movement it creates.
The artist’s practice develops between two contrasting states: attentive observation of other artists’ work and the solitude of creating her own. Regular visits to exhibitions in Paris form one part of this process, while another unfolds at Maison Stella Polare, her home and studio. In this private space, art is lived rather than simply displayed. The finished work matters, but so do the stages that precede it: hesitation, repetition, pauses, tension, and the period in which the final form has not yet emerged. This attention to process shapes the way Stella Polare thinks about exhibitions as well. Her perspective is not that of a detached observer attempting to explain what an artist intended. Instead, she is interested in the moment when a viewer becomes emotionally and physically involved in an artwork. Her point of view also brings together her experience as a woman artist, motherhood, bodily awareness, and a dialogue between East and West—not as subjects imposed upon individual works, but as elements that influence how she feels, observes, and responds.
As an author for Art & Craft News, Stella Polare will write about exhibitions from within this experience of perception. Her texts are not intended to provide definitive explanations of artworks or reduce them to conclusions. Instead, they examine what remains after an exhibition has ended and the visible image is no longer present. Why do certain forms continue to operate in memory? Why does one work disappear almost immediately while another continues to generate emotions, questions, or physical sensations long after the viewer has left the gallery? This approach treats art criticism less as an act of decoding and more as a record of encounter. Read the complete story in Art & Craft News to discover Stella Polare’s perspective on seeing, creating, and inhabiting contemporary art. For independent artists, her approach also highlights an important aspect of creative identity: a recognizable artistic practice can emerge not only from technique or subject matter, but from a consistent way of observing, questioning, and experiencing the world.
Crealandia brings together independent artists, designers, and makers working across contemporary art, handmade objects, digital products, collectibles, patterns, tutorials, miniatures, dolls, and many other creative fields. Stella Polare’s approach reflects a broader idea that is relevant far beyond galleries: creative work does not end when an object is completed. Meaning also develops through the person who encounters it, through memory, personal associations, cultural experience, and emotional response. For artists building an independent creative practice, presenting the thinking, process, atmosphere, and perspective behind a body of work can help communicate an artistic identity that extends beyond individual objects. A marketplace can therefore function not only as a place where works are presented, but also as another space in which audiences encounter different creative languages and discover the people behind them. Crealandia offers independent creators working in diverse disciplines a place to present their art and develop their own creative presence. Visit Crealandia to explore contemporary artists, makers, and original creative work.