Inside the creative world of artist and poet Arch Hades

Arch with one of the pieces from her Confessions series.

Eva Herzog

History holds a rich list of artist-poets, featuring such luminaries as William Blake, Victor Hugo, and Sylvia Plath, their practices distinguished by how the two disciplines relate. For Arch Hades, whose second solo show, Return | Ritorno, is taking place in a deconsecrated 17th-century church on Venice’s Grand Canal alongside this year’s Biennale Arte, ‘everything begins with poetry’.

Until her first exhibition in London last year, Arch was better known as a poet – a literary form she values for its ability ‘to connect across time and space’. Born in St Petersburg, her father was assassinated when she was eight, and her family fled Russia for London where they changed their names, their nationality and their language. It wasn’t easy, and Arch recalls how, at school, she would ‘escape into the library and read Byron’ – who, exiled from England in the early 19th century, romanticised his loneliness. In 2018, working in politics and experiencing the breakdown of her marriage, Arch started posting fragments of her own poetry on Instagram. She swiftly accrued a following of hundreds of thousands, and has since published six volumes of work, covering love as well as loftier philosophical ideas. In 2021 she sold her fourth book, Arcadia, as an NFT at Christie’s New York for over half a million dollars (making Arch the highest paid poet in the world).

The artist working on her 2025 piece, Return, which is the centrepiece of her Venice exhibition.