Bio

She combines hand-stitching with print and paint on raw calico, approaching textile as both a material and an archival language. Her work investigates maternal experience and the objectification of the female body, presenting motherhood not as an idealised state but as a form of resistance to acceleration, disposability, and the invisibility of care labour.

Samoylova has held solo exhibitions at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2022), Haze Gallery in Berlin (2022), and Outhouse Gallery in London (2025). Her work has been shown internationally across the UK, France, Italy, UAE, and featured in publications including Vogue Russia and The Collector.

Artist's statement

My practice employs raw calico, relief printing, and hand-embroidery to investigate the material weight of the domestic archive. Through a process of carving, printing, and stitching, I deconstruct folkloric ornamentation and rebuild it as biological architecture: cellular networks, roots, and vessels. By collapsing the distinction between ornament and anatomy, I reveal cultural patterns as living, vital systems.

I work with these materials to address the fragmentation of identity inherent in migration and motherhood. Drawing from a lineage of women whose labor was domestic and undocumented, I view the act of slow, repetitive handwork as a refusal of disposability. In my work, the textile becomes a site where the private and the repetitive are granted permanence.

In a global context of displacement and ecological pressure, my work enters the discourse on care and collective memory. I do not create monuments; instead, I produce surfaces where fragile, intimate histories can be encountered without resolution. By making the persistence of memory visible, my practice asserts the presence of the body as a primary vessel for carrying culture forward.