"Weight of Light" Painting

Zhanna Tsytsyn is a Pacific Northwest - based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the hidden structures connecting human experience to the wider cosmos. Born in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and raised between her father’s Russian homeland and her mother’s roots in Kobuleti, Georgia, she immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. This layered cultural upbringing informs a practice deeply attuned to questions of identity, belonging, and the universal threads woven through our shared human experience.

Through painting, sculpture, and mask-making, Tsytsyn creates luminous worlds where earthly and celestial realms intermingle, and every element carries its own quiet intelligence. Her process is intuitive, guided by texture, memory, light, and a deep relationship with nature and wild and remote landscapes. Working with oils, clay, ash, sand, soil, earth pigments, and foraged botanical materials, she builds richly layered surfaces and symbolic narratives shaped by pattern, rhythm, music, and automatism. Field studies, metaphysical research, folklore, and personal mythology serve as catalysts for visual stories that unfold between the seen and unseen.

At the heart of Tsytsyn’s practice is a desire to dissolve hierarchies between species, elements, and ways of being. Figures merge with their surroundings, symbols emerge and recede, and natural forms hold equal presence to human ones. Her compositions function as dreamlike spaces - part narrative, part elemental - where time and place become fluid. Acting as windows, mirrors, and living myths, her works invite moments of contemplation and recognition between body, earth, and cosmos, offering a deeper connection to the forces that shape both personal and collective futures.