Yana Payusova

BESTIARY - russian lubok series - ongoing

Bestiary is an ongoing sculptural series examining how political and cultural power is transformed into myth. Working in ceramics, I combine archival photographs of political and cultural figures with the visual languages of Russian lubok prints and Orthodox icon painting, using animal bodies as symbolic vessels through which authority, devotion, fear, and desire are projected.

Across the series, historical figures become mythic hybrids. In Procession, a reworking of the eighteenth-century lubok Mice Burying a Cat, photographs from Joseph Stalin’s funeral transform the satirical image into a meditation on political spectacle, collective mourning, and the visual construction of authority. Birds of Paradise draws on the Slavic mythological figures Sirin, Alkonost, and Gamayun, pairing these archetypes with historical figures whose legacies range from violence and authoritarianism to reform and moral witness.

The ceramic surface becomes a place where documentary record and visual seduction collide. Photographic transfers meet hand-painted ornament, gold luster, and iconographic imagery; historical fact meets folklore; the devotional meets the authoritarian. Through these hybrid forms, Bestiary asks how images transform individuals into myths - and how those myths, in turn, shape the ways we understand power, history, and ourselves.

Bestiary has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including:

Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale, Gyeonggi Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Icheon, Republic of Korea

Poodle’s Core, Krameramtshaus, Münster, Germany — two-person exhibition

Claybash, Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, New Jersey — juried by Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy

Absence Takes Form, Wasserman Projects, Detroit, Michigan