Lena Zinski/ Book Edition

Lena Zinski is a Belarusian-American writer and artist based in London. She is the author of three books published in Russian and now writes primarily in English. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Working across painting and literature, her practice explores memory, displacement, inherited trauma and the ways personal histories intersect with political violence. Through painting, collage and writing, she investigates what survives catastrophe and how beauty can become a form of endurance. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, and her poetry is featured in The Poetry Archive. Her visual work has been exhibited internationally.

You and I are Earth

I always have more, says earth is a mixed media work that abruptly confronts the viewer with the raw, unspoken generosity of mother earth — her capacity to hold, to absorb, and to endlessly give form to life. There are two distinct planes, the upper and the lower, divided by a rough line of broken thread. The upper field of the work is consumed by a dense, geological darkness: layers of paint built up into a surface that breathes and cracks like mineral strata, bringing to mind deep, penetrative layers labouring under the earth's own weight for centuries. Embedded within this blackness are traces of white — crystalline veins fracturing across the surface, like the memory of something alive pushing through. The viewer finds a world compressed into seemingly simple matter. Tactility is central to the work's force. The surface demands to be read not just with the eyes but with the whole body — one senses the touch of the artist's hand in every pitted hollow, every ridge of built-up paint, every embedded fragment. This is not a painted surface so much as a worked one, a terrain that bears the physical evidence of making: pressing, layering, tearing. The horizon line where the dark field gives way is not rendered but enacted — raw textile fibers physically torn and left to unravel downward in cascading threads, paint-soaked and root-like, reaching into the void below. This gesture, irreversible and deliberate, is where the artist's intervention becomes most legible: the hand that tears is also the hand that heals. A single thread of red punctuates the composition like a pulse, a wound, or a seed — the scarlet flash of a body full of life before it disappears. The title, spoken in the voice of the earth itself, carries both abundance and quiet defiance. Born in Belarus, Lena Zinski has long engaged with the aftermath of the 2020 uprising — its suppression, its grief, its stubborn persistence. That history lives beneath the surface of this work the way everything lives beneath the surface of soil: compressed, patient, unextinguished. The earth does not forget what has been pressed into it. It simply holds it, and waits, and insists it has more.