Beneath the Quiet Sky, Zhanna Tsytsyn, 2025, mixed media, 42 x 42 in. / 106.68 x 106.68 cm.

Carrying the Land: Identity and Memory in Zhanna Tsytsyn’s Art

January 2, 2026 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Beneath the Quiet Sky, Zhanna Tsytsyn, 2025, mixed media, 42 x 42 in. / 106.68 x 106.68 cm.

Across sculpture and painting, Zhanna Tsytsyn examines the body as a site where land, memory, and identity converge.

Zhanna Tsytsyn is a contemporary mixed media artist exploring identity, migration, and land through sculptural forms and material-driven, symbolically charged works.

The works gathered here, The Weight of Becoming Mask, Threshold of Light, and Veins of the Earth Mask, belong to Tsytsyn’s ongoing Carriers of Landscape series, a body of work that treats soil not merely as material, but as lived experience. Through clay, fabric, pigment, and found elements, these pieces explore how personal and collective histories are carried, worn, and transformed by the human form.

Explore our curated selection of contemporary artists from around the globe.

Naturalist Gallery offers artist representation internationally. Apply your art.

The Weight of Becoming Mask, Zhanna Tsytsyn, 2025, mixed media, 28 x 9 x 4.5 in. / 71.12 x 22.86 x 11.43 cm.

Rather than functioning as a conventional mask, The Weight of Becoming Mask reads as a physical burden suspended between concealment and emergence. The elongated horns and cascading red fringe suggest gravity and inheritance, as if memory itself has weight. The dark, star-speckled face evokes both interior cosmos and ancestral depth, while the tactile surfaces, clay, mesh, and fabric, reinforce the sense of something shaped by time and pressure. Here, identity is not fixed; it is something actively borne, layered, and negotiated.

Threshold of Light, Zhanna Tsytsyn, 2025, mixed media, 48 x 36 in. / 121.92 x 91.44 cm.

In Threshold of Light, the human figure dissolves into a symbolic landscape. Two mirrored bodies, joined by braided hair, face outward while remaining bound at the center, creating a visual axis between separation and unity. The descending sun and flowing pigments suggest ritual, migration, and continuity across generations. By incorporating collected earth and raw pigment, Tsytsyn collapses the distance between land and body, positioning the figure as both carrier and extension of place. The work feels ceremonial, marking a passage between past and present, origin and becoming.

Veins of the Earth Mask, Zhanna Tsytsyn, 2025, mixed media, 36 x 10 in. / 91.44 x 25.4 cm.

The organic structure of Veins of the Earth Mask pushes this fusion even further. Branching driftwood rises from the sculptural form like exposed roots or neural pathways, while blue and red fibers descend in opposing streams. The mask resembles a cross-section of terrain, arteries of soil made visible, suggesting that the land itself breathes through the body. This piece frames identity as ecological, shaped as much by environment as by personal history, and insists that what flows beneath the surface is as defining as what is seen.

Taken together, these works articulate a central theme: identity as landscape. Tsytsyn’s Carriers of Landscape series resists static definitions of self, instead presenting the body as a living archive of place, migration, and memory. Through hybrid forms and materially rich surfaces, the artist proposes that becoming is inseparable from the earth we move through, and the earth we carry within us.

Learn more About Naturalist Gallery of Contemporary Art.