About the Artist

Elena Folomeeva, artist and founder of Atelier MHB

The Artist

ELENA FOLOMEEVA
Artist · Collage Maker · Founder of Atelier MHB

Collage · Mixed Media · Illustration · Objects
Based in Ohio, USA

The first language

"Collage was my first love, and it remains the language I speak most naturally."

I also work with illustration, graphic design, mixed media, digital processes and objects — but collage is the structure underneath them all: fragments that already carry a history are brought together until they begin to tell another one.

Before the Atelier

Two disciplines shaped the way I work.

I studied illustration and graphic design — and I also built a professional life in hospitality, becoming a trained restaurant General Manager.

One taught me how images hold attention. The other taught me how space, ritual, detail and care shape an experience.

Both eventually entered the Atelier.

What was there first

Long before I had a name for my practice, I was drawn to antique and vintage objects, old books, good literature, classical music, botanical forms — and the peculiar intimacy of things that have already belonged to another time.

I think I have always been interested in objects that seem to remember something.

The method

The archive leads. The hand decides. Tools follow.

SOURCE → CONSTRUCTION → WORK

The working process: from archival source, through digital construction, to finished work

I work with historical and public-domain imagery, drawing, collage logic, composition and digital construction. Auxiliary generated material may enter the process where it serves the work.

The technology is not the subject. The decision is.

Neurovintage is the name I give this way of working: an archival visual language expanded through contemporary processes. The archive provides the material; my decisions determine what survives, what is altered, and what new relationship appears between fragments.

What I make

Some works remain images. Others ask for texture, weight, scale or function.

My practice moves between the flat image and the physical object, but the same things keep returning: cultural memory, symbolism, nature, theatricality — and the strange afterlife of familiar forms.

At some point, making the image was no longer enough. A collage could become a print, a paper artefact, a relief, a mirror, a textile, a sculptural experiment — or a small object made to be kept.

I became interested not only in what an image means, but in what happens when it occupies real space.

The Atelier

Eventually, all these lives met in one place: Atelier MHB.

A place where collage can become a character, a garden, an object, a room, a letter — and sometimes an entire private mythology.

Objects from Atelier MHB — the wrapped Le Théâtre des Objets Voilés deck and collectible pieces

Next chapter — THE JARDIN DES ARCHÉTYPES.

Selected recognition

  • Merit Award · Defiance Society of Artists · 2025
  • Inclusive Harmony · audience recognition, U.S.–China Visions · 2023
  • Selected in international juried exhibitions
  • Featured interview · VoyageLA · October 14, 2024
  • Professional Member — International Association of Art USA (IAA-USA)
  • Member — National Collage Society
  • INSIDE LVMH certificate · 2026
  • Ohio Arts Council — Ohio Artist Registry

Exhibitions & public art

Beyond my own studio

My practice also enters other people's spaces, stories and projects through commissions, collaborations and public programs: artist-led programs for Bryan Public Library, archival heritage work for Bard Manufacturing, commissioned decks and collectible objects, visual merchandise for an internationally known traveler, and art direction and decorative work for restaurant spaces.

I like working where an artistic language has to meet a real place, a real history and a real audience.

Press

  • VoyageLA — "Daily Inspiration: Meet Elena Folomeeva" · October 14, 2024
  • Northwest Signal — "Northwest Ohio artists enter art show" · November 2025
  • The Bryan Times — "Area artists enter art show" · November 2025

Elsewhere