Olga Chekmazova is a UK-based conceptual artist and researcher working across sculpture, light assemblage, and found objects.

She holds an honours degree in Radio Engineering (2013) and spent her early career in the space industry, developing docking systems for spacecraft. In 2020, she transitioned into historical lighting restoration as a practice of peaceful resistance against the erasure of historical memory and industrial overproduction. Since then, she has sourced, attributed, and reconstructed over 650 historic lighting fixtures from discarded components and loose fragments (Alter Vista Crafts).

Initially turning to Soviet-era functional artifacts as a tool to process the complex history of her native culture, Olga developed a research-led methodology centered on direct material analysis. Examining items from custom-cast brass to standardized hex nuts, she isolated how specific historical periods inscribed their priorities and flaws into functional design. In 2023, she launched Electricity as Art, an educational and research project that has trained over 120 practitioners globally in historical lighting methodology.

Now based in the UK, she extends this practice to local industrial and architectural remnants. Working at the intersection of functionalism and surrealism, Olga uses material assemblage and light to establish a dialogue with her new host culture — a practice recently exhibited in institutional settings including Standen House (National Trust), Hastings Contemporary, and Fabrica (Brighton) — while treating her personal lived experience as an analytical container to examine the friction, convergence, and dialogue between a displaced identity and a new environment.