Irina Drozd’s contribution to Orbis Imaginalis introduces a pictorial and sculptural system in which ornament, corporeality, childhood iconography and material transformation become inseparable, because the works consistently begin from historically stabilised visual languages and subsequently subject them to processes of mutation that alter their symbolic function. The porcelain figures preserve references to decorative sculpture, Rococo figurines, domestic objects and the visual culture of intimacy, refinement and ornament, while simultaneously allowing organic forms, fleshy protrusions, root systems and hybrid extensions to emerge from within these structures. The object therefore remains recognisable and unstable at the same time. Historical memory persists, yet its order changes.
This mechanism acquires particular significance in the porcelain works because porcelain itself carries an extensive cultural history linked to collecting practices, aristocratic interiors, domestic display and the codification of taste. Rosalind Krauss’ writings on sculpture and expanded categories become relevant here since Drozd continuously moves between object, body and image without preserving strict disciplinary boundaries. The figurines cease to function as autonomous decorative entities and begin operating as active sites of transformation in which ornament enters biological processes and matter acquires an almost metabolic character.
The paintings extend this logic through another register. Child figures, floral systems, red organic masses, roots, seeds, bodily fragments and proliferating forms appear repeatedly and construct worlds in which childhood loses its conventional association with innocence and instead becomes a zone of instability, memory and psychic projection. The child occupies a structurally complex position within these works because it functions simultaneously as image, witness and carrier of transformation. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides an important framework at this point since it addresses precisely those moments in which established boundaries between body, object and environment lose stability and symbolic systems encounter their own limits.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body further deepens this reading because his understanding of corporeality is built around openness, expansion, permeability and continuous exchange with the surrounding world. Drozd’s practice operates through comparable processes. Bodies extend beyond anatomical limits, decorative structures move toward organic growth and ornament develops into a living system. Transformation therefore appears as a constitutive principle of the image itself.
Hans Belting’s image anthropology becomes equally productive because Drozd repeatedly destabilises the distinction between image, body and medium: sculpture becomes almost an organism, porcelain becomes almost flesh and ornament enters the territory of growth. The works remain suspended between categories and maintain coherence through continuous transformation.
Within Orbis Imaginalis, this mechanism resonates directly with Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, because Borges constructs worlds sustained through internally coherent systems whose reality emerges from their own logic. Drozd’s practice generates comparable worlds. Organic structures proliferate according to internal necessity, symbolic orders shift from within and meaning develops through accumulation, mutation and reconfiguration.