By Martin Robinson

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Arch Hades has a cool name (“Archibald is my middle name but I go by Arch because otherwise I sound like an elderly Republican senator on trial for embezzling the Louisiana State Pension Fund,” she says) which is half the battle in art, but the rest of the battle is now being undertaken by this deep-thinking, dazzlingly creative powerhouse who is moving beyond the poetry that made her name into the visual realm.

Hades is this week unveiling her first solo exhibition in the capital called We’re All Just Passing Through, a mix of surreal, existential painting and sculpture, centring around, “what I call my memories and nostalgia series. Pretty much all the painting have black as their background because to me, only when we close our eyes do memories emerge out of the darkness.”

Hades was born in Russia but her family fled the country when she was young, and she is now a British citizen, who says “as a first generation immigrant I find London to be a beautiful, thriving place that I’m grateful to for embracing me.”

After boarding school and university, she was steered into a proper job in politics, but poetry was her deeper calling, a consolation for “loneliness or hurt or heartbreak.”

Her “passionate outlet,” eventually resulted in her writing six books of poetry and making a huge splash with the largest fee paid for a piece of poetry ever: Arcadia, a collaboration with a designer and musician, which was sold as a digital fine art piece at Christie’s in New York for $525,000. “It was the three of us mucking around, so to sell it for that much money was an incredible honour and privilege, and literally bought me this house.”

She divides her time between London and the nice house in the countryside she’s talking about – “I feel I’ve really made it because I have a separate utility room and don’t have to dry my clothes in a hallway with flatmates around”, where he loves to work in isolation: “Every time I get serious with a partner, they ask should we move in, and I’m like, ‘no’. That normally breaks the relationship, which is a bummer.”

While she’s now retrained as a painter, the poetry makes its presence felt in her sculptures, including Isle which work with ‘sound showers’. “Poetry will be inscribed on the sculpture but when you’re into it, you’ll hear it read aloud by me.”

She’ll also be debuting her Confession series, wall-mounted excerpts from her journals over the last 20 years. “The objects themselves look like discarded pieces of paper, a confession that you potentially write. But then they are sort of rediscovered, unfurled, and mounted on a wall as a beautiful fine art object.

It’s about reclaiming something that perhaps puts us in a special place of vulnerability, something that perhaps we don’t want to share with the public. Philip Larkin who said that, you know, poetry is a confession we write.”

This kind of thing doesn’t make her feel too exposed, she says you have to necessarily be “quite unselfconscious” as an artist, and she simply hopes that, “my innermost thoughts, feelings and desires will hopefully make anyone else who has felt like that feel less alone.”

She says she is drawn to more Gothic elements – “I can’t imagine myself every painting with orange” – but for all its monochrome moodiness there’s a certain brave spirit to the work and to Hades herself, that has clearly taken her through the darkness she has experienced.

“You have to have self-confidence as any creative person where you think, I want to share this with the public. But there are certain things that I only painted to myself that I keep in my attic that are just there gathering dust, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, that won’t see the light of day until I die myself. Then questions will be asked.”

We Are All Just Passing Through is at 8 Berkeley Square until December 21 archhades.com