Maya Golyshkina’s papier-mâché planet of bog roll bras and butt-naked barbies

Image: via Maya Golyshkina

The full quickfire Q&A article was published for CHECK-OUT Magazine and can be read here.

In the space between childhood pop culture and arts-and-craft class, you’ll probably find Maya Golyshkina’s imagination. It’s here on Golyshkina’s eclectic papier-mâché planet that you’ll find its inhabitants flaunting bog roll bras under the supreme reign of Ronald McDonald. The Russian artist has used the past year in lockdown to refine her whimsical eye for creation. Obscuring the ordinary into the outrageous; if it’s not a miniskirt of butt-naked Barbies slung around her hips, she’s forming mermaid couture from playing cards, smashing egg shells into her eye sockets (Covid has truly cracked us all) or going full-frontal pink a la Patrick Star. What started as a boredom antidote quickly evolved into a photo series with Marc Jacobs and several quirky zine collaborations. Somewhat normal but broadly surreal, her work is a satirical mirror pointed at our current livelihoods. 

Bringing a new meaning to model-making, Golyshkina both makes and models. After studying art in her early teens the 19-year-old became a photographer, yet found the career’s superficial nature – blame the selfie generation – to be tiresome. So armed with a glue gun, the anything-but-banal artist decided to elicit emotion from everyday items and add jollity back to scrolling of the ‘gram. Alongside turning the monotonous upside down, her work also defies femininity and expectations of female anatomy online: “Boys here see the girl for sex, so when I knock down these walls they think I’m crazy.” By utilising mundane objects as garments she ironically un-objectifies the body. “I can become anything I want to be, a beautiful girl, a sexy girl on my own terms,” she explains. Perhaps the best symbolism is Golyshkina’s carrier dress as a pertinent response to the Katy Perry question: Do you ever feel like a plastic bag? Right now, yes.