Polina Isurin is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work unfolds across painting, installation, video, writing, and mixed media, bridging personal and collective realms of memory, identity, and cultural translation. Additionally, Polina has been teaching visual art courses to middle, high school, and college level students since 2012. She is currently an Ohio Teaching Artist through the Ohio Arts Council, and teaches at the Columbus College of Art and Design. Polina is both committed and interested in how creative and pedagogical practices can coexist.  

Artist Statement 

I am drawn to the spaces between worlds—literal, linguistic, cultural, and internal. My bicultural and bilingual upbringing informs an ongoing inquiry: how do the remnants of memory shape individual identity and collective narrative?

My practice is concept-driven, with each project determining its own material form whether that’s painting, installation, writing, or mixed media. Across these mediums, I investigate “in-between” spaces: the edges of memory and language, moments of translation, and the unstable terrain of what resists fixed definition.

A consistent visual language runs throughout my work which includes muted earth tones, layered surfaces, and an attention to what lies beneath. Rooted in my foundation as an oil painter, the logic of underpainting (both as a beginning and a concealed structure) continues to shape how I build images, mirroring the way memory operates: sedimented, partial, and persistently present beneath the surface.

My installations, such as Justice, Rootlessness, and Buried Secret (Obelisk for the Future)—invite viewers into layered environments that function as memoryscapes, where traces of the past and residues of the present, or future, converge. Material, color, and form accumulate rather than resolve, echoing the instability and persistence of remembered experience.

This inquiry extends through my research, including my doctoral work, Where I Am From: Developing a Pedagogy of Memories through an Emergent Practice-Based Self-Study, which brings together my roles as artist, educator, and immigrant. Through memory-based self-study, I approach art and teaching as intertwined practices, treating memory as both subject and generative method. My work is grounded in site-specificity and embodied narrative, with an emphasis on creativity and pedagogy being intertwined paths of inquiry and transformation.

Across my work, memory (as a shifting, fragile, and formative subject) remains a central theme. It is through this lens that I continue to examine questions of where I come from, belonging, transmission, and to consider how art can hold, translate, and reimagine lived experience.

*Online portfolio is curated. Please inquire about older or additional artwork.