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photo by Sergey Novikov @plus1ap

Anna Samoylova - Everyday Sacredness

written by Tereza Blahova



“Golden Stars: Everyday Sacredness is an ongoing visual diary about daily life with my daughter. These small, intimate portraits come from our everyday moments — feeding, sleeping, caring, tenderness, and tiredness…Through this process, I speak about the invisible work of motherhood — the repeated gestures of care and love that support life but often stay unnoticed.”
  -Anna Samoylova


When I enter, the Outhouse walls are hung with several small and mid-size linoprint canvases, capturing close-up moments of mother and child in red ink, embroidered over at points with Orthodox-stylised golden stars and pearls, which, Samoylova states, are not intended here to symbolise luxury, but to quietly “honour the sacred in the everyday.” The artist’s image making compositions draw the viewer inward— many are closely cropped within the frame, two faces suspended in blank space, hinting at the formation of a new world entirely, an existence forever changed by emergent new life. One image in particular stands out— a tiny foot resting against the mother’s half-depicted face. Her expression borders on weary, yet this little limb, too, is gold-adorned- motherhood is difficult, and yet its spoils akin to saintly blessings.


Managing to catch Samoylova’s show the day of close, I am met at the doors by an unexpected toddler tour guide, crawling and babbling contentedly. While not the same daughter after which the images have been made (instead, that of the artist’s friend, I check), her preciously youthful presence whips red-and-cream linocuts into three-dimensional representation, a real-life insight into the everyday types of tenderness so foundational to the artist’s work.


photo by Sergey Novikov @plus1ap

Interesting, too, is the contrast between Orthodox-image making traditions to which Samoylova visually refers, requiring several layers of painting onto wooden panels, gilding, and the subsequent reverential devotion in religious contexts, and the frequent inclusion of modern technologies such as phones in the resultant prints. Here, Samoylova acknowledges a desire to work “between two visual languages — the sacred image and the digital photo stream.” There is tension between the time-consuming nature of physical, artistic image making, and the manner of capturing reference images in the digital age, snapped readily in their hundreds at the press of a button. Through her prints, Samoylova re-curates and re-elevates fleeting moments of love and care, tenderness evident in her choice of medium alone, slowly carving and pressing and printing something which is already and easily extant. Care emanates from process and imagery alike, signposting even the mundane daily realities of mothering—the everyday sacredness—as undeniably worthy of elevation and immortalisation beyond the digital realm. 


In another way, the mother’s gaze places itself in the eyes of the newborn, for whom everything is still new and otherworldly; she counters the inevitable forgetting that comes with growing up, by freezing such moments on canvas and in time. 


Sacredness extends to the curation of the gallery space. In the exhibition text, Sophie Nowakowska notes that Samoylova’s canvases have been hung slightly above eye level in reference to worshipful positioning of icons in Orthodox churches, requiring a sight gaze toward the heavens. As a nearly six-foot tall woman, I instead meet the pictures at perfect eye-level, contrary to installatory objective. And yet, this small touch serves to only bring me closer into the artist’s inner world— I now know I am invited to look through her own eyes, gaze upon this private motherly world made public, perceive the reverence with which she treats her daughter not only through the resultant images, but through the physical positioning of mine and others’ bodies within the space, much as in a church, hinting a certain site-specificity. 

photo by Sergey Novikov @plus1ap
Starry iconography extends as painted onto windows, and extant wooden ceiling beams in the once-public-lavatory further the sentiment of being inside some ancient chapel, sainthood and motherhood presented as parallel. We are given a look at modern day motherhood that exists always in the shadow of previously established cultural, societal, and religious norms, forever requiring some level of sacrifice. Affect is derived much from the way in which images are situated in space, as from their individual and combined visual content. Displayed, meanwhile, are not only the final lino-prints, but a selection of the very carved stencils from which they were made, placing at the forefront the process of labour within the artistic process, and thus the process of motherhood’s intrinsic labouring. Once again, the mundane, the otherwise forgotten or discarded, is elevated on par with the artistic outcome, or even framed as the artistic outcome, giving a sense of quiet bravery in its platforming of that which may not be traditionally valued by others, in an extension of mothering’s often-unseen work.


Overall, Samoylova proves that moments of parenthood do not have to be monumental to warrant memorialisation. She foregrounds and honours not only her own child, but her own work as a mother and by extension mothers everywhere, working to give and support life behind once-closed, slowly-opening doors. Her use of embroidery is notable, connoting craft histories and their historic exclusion from the wider artistic canon due to unjust devaluation as ‘women’s work.’ Leaving the show, I feel both touched and hopeful, recognisant of women’s strength and ability to create, nurture, and protect; persevering and creating their rightful place at the table despite the many exhaustions that life brings. 



Everyday Sacredness
Anna Samoylova 

Curated by 
Sophie Nowakowska

15th-23rd November 2025

at outhouse gallery