speakingtomato is the online name of Olena, a digital artist based in Turkey who was born in Lithuania and raised in Ukraine. She began her career in portrait photography before turning to AI art in 2022, after a period of immobility following surgery. Her AI-driven images fuse modernism, surrealism, and symbolism into surreal, dreamlike scenes.
Her work often returns to butterflies, which she has long raised, as symbols of metamorphosis and transformation. In 2023 her work Overobserving was included in “E-motions”, an exhibition of 26 artists curated by Claire Silver. The piece uses a multitude of eyes to suggest that, despite unprecedented access to information, viewers are left searching for depth and nuance. She is a member of the AI-art collective MAIF and of TEZ Girls, a community for female NFT artists, and has herself collected more than 200 blockchain-based AI artworks.
