Eva Shorina’s contribution to Orbis Imaginalis unfolds through highly saturated pictorial environments in which botanical proliferation, ritual objects, hybrid beings, skeletal figures and symbolic artefacts enter a common visual system. The works construct image spaces that recall the historical logic of the Wunderkammer, the allegorical density of vanitas traditions and the expansive narrative structures of visionary painting. Skulls, vessels, masks, lunar forms and transformed bodies appear throughout the compositions and establish a field in which iconographic fragments accumulate into internally coherent worlds. The pictorial space therefore operates as a constructed epistemic environment whose reality emerges from relation and symbolic continuity.
Particularly significant is the treatment of landscape. Forest structures, ritual clearings and densely layered vegetal formations become carriers of transformation. Human figures lose stable anthropomorphic definition and enter hybrid states together with animal bodies, mythological creatures and ceremonial presences. This movement activates a visual language that resonates with Aby Warburg’s concept of surviving forms, where historical motifs persist through migration and reconfiguration. The works gather heterogeneous symbolic material and reorganise it into autonomous pictorial cosmologies.
Within the context of Orbis Imaginalis, Shorina’s position establishes an important expansion of Borges’ model of internally generated realities. The landscapes function as worlds governed by their own visual laws. Meaning develops through symbolic echo and structural relation. Borges’ proposition that worlds acquire ontological force through internal consistency becomes directly relevant here because Shorina’s images sustain their reality through the coherence of their own systems rather than through external referential confirmation.
The iconographic complexity simultaneously opens a dialogue with historical precedents reaching from Hieronymus Bosch to Symbolist image traditions. The skeletal presences, ritual settings and transformed creatures produce environments situated between allegory, dream structure and mythological narrative. The image becomes a site of accumulation in which memory, death, metamorphosis and vegetation participate within one continuous visual order.