Some studios begin with a business plan. Ours began with two artists discovering that they could create together.
Two Artists, One Shared Practice
Long before Untitled Square had a name, we were already working side by side—painting on the same canvas, exchanging ideas, challenging each other, and learning how to let two different artistic instincts exist within a single piece.
Collaboration between artists is not unusual, but finding a creative relationship where neither voice had to disappear into the other felt rare to us. We weren’t trying to make the same work or think in the same way. What interested us was what could happen in the space between two different ways of seeing.
That collaboration became the foundation of Untitled Square: a shared creative practice shaped not by sameness, but by dialogue.
From Canvas to Clay
At first, painting was our shared language. Then, during a long trip away from home, something shifted. One of us met an artist who painted on ceramics and began taking classes with them. What started as curiosity opened up a larger question: if you already know how to paint, why should the canvas be the limit?
It wasn’t simply about learning to paint on clay. It was the realization that an idea doesn’t necessarily belong to a single material.
We had never thought of ourselves as artists defined by one medium.
Canvas, clay, wood, fabric—these are languages. The idea comes first.
Sometimes an idea wants to be painted. Sometimes it needs volume. Sometimes several materials need to come together before it makes sense. We don’t always know in advance, and we like it that way.
Letting the Idea Choose the Material
When that idea came home with us, we began experimenting together. We painted, built, worked with ceramics and wood, brought in fabric and other materials, and allowed the work to tell us what it needed.
Learning Through Failure
A lot of it failed.
Ceramics, especially, taught us that making something once doesn’t mean you know how to make it. Pieces cracked, surfaces changed, glazes surprised us, and some things never became what we had imagined.
We threw things away and started again.
Gradually, failure stopped feeling separate from the creative process; it became part of it. Each mistake revealed something about the material, the idea, or the way we were approaching it.
Slowly, the ideas in our heads began finding their physical form.
Art That Lives With You
Somewhere in that process, another question appeared: why should the art we create exist separately from the lives we live?
We became interested in creating objects that could carry the thought, individuality, and presence of an artwork while also becoming part of everyday life.
An object can sit on your table, move through your home, be touched, used, and noticed—and over time become part of the visual memory of a place.
That possibility continues to shape the work we make.
Why “Untitled Square”?
And that brings us to the name: Untitled Square.
Untitled belongs to the studio. For us, it represents the freedom not to decide too early what something has to be.
Today, an idea may become ceramic. Tomorrow, it may need wood, fabric, painting, or a material we haven’t worked with yet. We don’t want the definition of what kind of artists we are to decide that in advance.
The idea gets to decide.
And then there is the Square.
We think of the Square as the space where all of this can happen—a shared place where artists, different materials, observations, experiments, failures, and instincts can meet, and where an untitled idea can slowly take shape.
The studio is the Square. The work enters Untitled. Somewhere in the process, it finds its form, its story, and sometimes, its name.
That is Untitled Square.
Not a ceramic studio. Not a painting studio. Not a definition of what we make.
A space for discovering what an idea can become.
Beyond the Object
And this is where Beyond the Object begins.
Here, we want to look beyond the finished piece: at materials, mistakes, collaboration, memory, handmade objects, and the questions that arise along the way.
We don’t know exactly where all of them will lead.
But then again, that is the whole idea.
We like to leave things untitled long enough to discover what they want to become.
— Lilia & Alisa
