Gestures examines how social expectations become embodied in everyday actions. The series focuses on the hand - a part of the body capable of tenderness, labor, obedience, violence, care, and resistance - and treats seemingly ordinary gestures as carriers of cultural and gendered meaning.

Each sculpture isolates a hand engaged in an ambiguous act: holding a cigarette, a gun, an embroidery hoop, a rolling pin, a bird, a candle, or an item of clothing. Familiar gestures and domestic objects become psychologically charged, suggesting the ways roles and expectations are learned, performed, and internalized.

The works draw on the visual language of portraiture and the theatricality of symbolic gesture. Ceramic hands are combined with objects and imagery that shift between the personal and the archetypal. What initially appears intimate or familiar can become unsettling, humorous, or threatening.

Rather than presenting power as something imposed solely from above, Gestures considers how it is reproduced through everyday behavior. The hand becomes both actor and witness - a site where care and control, vulnerability and agency, conformity and resistance can occupy the same gesture.

Weight, Power, Burden examines how personal and collective histories become embodied in objects and carried through the body. The sculptures bring together human figures and familiar domestic or cultural objects, treating them as vessels of memory, authority, desire, and inherited experience.

The figures carry, balance, support, or are surrounded by objects whose meanings extend beyond their physical presence. Things that might ordinarily appear familiar or mundane become charged with histories of family, culture, gender, labor, migration, and political experience. What we inherit can sustain us as easily as it can weigh us down.

Drawing on portraiture, folk imagery, and symbolic sculpture, the works occupy a space between the personal and the archetypal. The body becomes a site where private experience intersects with larger cultural histories, while objects become repositories for memories that may be inherited, chosen, or imposed.

The title names three conditions that often exist simultaneously: weight as physical and emotional presence, power as the forces that determine what we carry, and burden as the histories and expectations that remain with us. The series asks what we carry from the worlds that shaped us - and whether we can ever fully separate ourselves from what we have inherited.

Two-Headed Tales is a narrative-based painting and installation project rooted in real and imagined memories of growing up in Leningrad during the final years of the Soviet Union. Told through the perspective of a young girl and her ambiguous double, the work unfolds as a surreal journey through a world populated by bureaucrats, fortune tellers, snoops, apparatchiks, and other fantastical figures.

The characters and situations emerge from the collision of childhood imagination with the contradictions of adult social and political life. Familiar experiences - bureaucracy, scarcity, surveillance, social hierarchies, and family dynamics - are transformed into allegorical encounters in which logic is unstable and ordinary behavior becomes absurd.

Drawing from Russian folk imagery, comics, illustration, and narrative painting, the works construct a fictional world somewhere between memory, fairy tale, and social history. The project established an early interest in the ways imagination can transform lived experience into narrative, a concern that continues throughout Payusova's later practice.

Kunstkamera is a body of paintings and sculptural works inspired by the cabinet of curiosities - a space for collecting, categorizing, and displaying fragments of the world. Named after the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, the project considers collecting as both preservation and interpretation: what we choose to remember, how we organize those memories, and what we leave out.

The works bring together observed personalities, gestures, domestic objects, imagined encounters, and fragments of cultural experience. Familiar figures are removed from ordinary contexts and reorganized into psychologically charged scenes that hover between observation, invention, and memory.

The act of collecting becomes a metaphor for constructing personal and cultural narratives. Like a curator assembling a museum, I select, classify, and arrange fragments of experience, transforming them into a subjective version of the world. What appears to be a record is therefore also a fiction.

Kunstkamera established an approach that continues throughout my practice: using images and objects to question who has the authority to construct a narrative, what becomes preserved as history, and how memory is shaped by the stories we choose to tell.

When My Neighbor Told Me I Would Die explores the unstable territory between memory, family narrative, and invention. Drawing from childhood experiences, family stories, photographs, and imagined events, the paintings examine how memories change as they are retold - absorbing details, emotions, and interpretations that may have little relationship to what actually occurred.

The works occupy a space between autobiography and fiction. Familiar experiences are transformed through densely layered imagery in which people, objects, and events overlap, repeat, and contradict one another. A remembered event can become more vivid through repetition even as its factual certainty diminishes; a story heard often enough can become indistinguishable from something personally experienced.

Humor and absurdity coexist with moments of anxiety and vulnerability, reflecting the way childhood perception can turn ordinary experiences into mythology.

The series considers memory as a living construction - continually revised by time, storytelling, desire, and perspective. These early investigations into the glitches between what happened, what was remembered, and what was imagined became an important foundation for Payusova's continuing interest in the construction of personal and cultural narratives.

Russian Prison Series emerged from my experience volunteering in prisons in St. Petersburg, where I worked with incarcerated young men between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. Listening to their stories led me to question how individuals become defined by the labels assigned to them: criminal, convict, sinner, or outcast.

The series combines photographic portraits with imagery drawn from Russian Orthodox iconography and the visual language of prison tattoos. These two symbolic systems - one associated with spiritual judgment and salvation, the other with identity, hierarchy, and belonging - are brought into confrontation with the individual faces of the subjects.

Sinner’s Tier extends this investigation through an eight-panel work based on the Deesis Tier of the Russian Orthodox iconostasis. Sacred figures are replaced by hands marked with symbolic rings derived from prison tattoo language, transforming the iconostasis into a meditation on judgment, identity, and belonging.

The series became an early investigation into a question that continues throughout my practice: how do systems of classification and belief shape the images through which we understand other people - and ourselves?

Sinner’s Tier extends the visual language of the Russian Prison Series through a direct encounter between Russian Orthodox iconography and the coded symbolism of prison tattoos.

The eight-panel work draws on the Deesis Tier of the Russian Orthodox iconostasis, traditionally organized around Christ and figures who intercede on behalf of humanity. In place of saints and biblical figures, I use hands as portraits - each marked with symbolic “rings” derived from the tattoo language of incarcerated men. The hands become stand-ins for individual lives, carrying fragments of biography, identity, hierarchy, and experience.

By replacing sacred figures with these symbolic portraits, the work collapses distinctions between saint and sinner, sacred and profane. The iconostasis becomes a framework for considering who is granted the status of a sinner, who is judged, and who has the authority to determine the difference.

The work reflects a larger concern of the Russian Prison Series: the ways communities create visual languages to identify, categorize, and understand their members - and how those systems of representation can simultaneously reveal and conceal the complexity of an individual life.