Four Years After Fleeing Ukraine, Artist Iryna Gusiuk Has Discovered That Home Isn’t Just a Place—It’s Something We Create
When Ukrainian artist Iryna Gusiuk arrived in Ocean Springs four years ago, she painted what she’d lost. Today, she’s painting what she’s found.
The difference isn’t simply reflected in her artwork, but also in the life she’s rebuilt along the Gulf Coast.
South Mississippi Living readers may remember Gusiuk’s story from 2022, when she fled war-torn Ukraine with her young daughter, Kira, and her mother, Polina. An accomplished artist, interior designer, and art professor, she left behind a successful career and the country that had shaped both her life and her artwork.
One of the first paintings she completed after arriving in Mississippi became her way of saying farewell. “It was goodbye to the life I had left behind and preserving my connection to the place that shaped me,” Gusiuk said.
As the months passed, those deeply personal works gave way to something new. She began painting the Gulf Coast itself—the marshes, waterways, towering oaks, and the quiet beauty.
“I wanted to slow down and truly observe my new surroundings,” she said. “Through landscape painting, I was gradually getting to know my new home and learning how to be present again.”
It took time.
Nearly a year and a half passed before she felt she could breathe deeply enough to fully embrace this next chapter, both personally and creatively.
Her work has evolved beyond landscapes and returned to the figurative paintings she believes best express her artistic voice. Through them, she explores identity, memory, resilience, vulnerability, and the quiet emotional experiences that connect us all.
“More than anything, I hope that when someone stands in front of my work, they feel less alone,” she said.
That desire to create connection has resonated with audiences throughout the Coast and beyond.
Since arriving in Mississippi, Gusiuk has steadily established herself within the American art community. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Meridian Museum of Art and the Pensacola Museum of Art. She has earned awards in Ocean Springs, is represented by My Happy Place Gallery, was recently recognized among 100 Women Artists on the Rise, and her solo exhibition, Soft Architecture, is currently on display at The Traveler by Walter Anderson in Ocean Springs.
Yet when asked which accomplishment means the most, she doesn’t mention a single award. “I’m most proud of having the courage to begin again,” she said.
Before coming to the United States, Gusiuk spent 16 years teaching art in Ukraine while exhibiting her work nationally and internationally. Arriving in Mississippi meant stepping into an entirely new artistic community where no one knew her name.
“I had to introduce myself—and my work—to people who had never heard of me before,” she said.
Rather than viewing that challenge as starting over, Gusiuk chose to see it differently. “I may have started a new chapter, but I did not start from nothing,” she said. “I brought with me my experience, my craftsmanship, my artistic voice, and my belief that honest work can resonate with people anywhere.”
That philosophy is reflected in Soft Architecture, her first solo exhibition in the United States. Despite its title, the collection isn’t about buildings. Instead, it explores what she calls our “inner architecture”—the invisible emotional spaces shaped by memory, resilience, and dreams.
After leaving Ukraine, she found herself thinking often about the meaning of home. “I realized that home is not only a physical place,” she said. “It is something we gradually rebuild within ourselves, even when everything around us has changed.”
Gusiuk is currently creating new figurative works while teaching both children and adults through private lessons and online classes for students around the world. She is also preparing work for national juried exhibitions and museum competitions, continuing to build a career that spans continents while remaining rooted on the Coast.
Her paintings no longer focus solely on what was left behind. Instead, they reflect the life she has carefully rebuilt—one defined not only by survival, but by hope, purpose, and possibility.
Gusiuk feels home is no longer measured by geography alone. It is found in a studio filled with fresh canvases, in students discovering their own artistic voices, in a daughter growing up surrounded by opportunity, and in an Ocean Springs community that welcomed an artist carrying far more than just luggage.
Sometimes home isn’t where our story begins. Sometimes it’s where we find the courage to begin again.
