Daria Davydova doesn’t know why she began making faces, only that they were always there.

But art was more a lifestyle than a career plan. Davydova grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine immersed in creativity. “Everyone was doing something, playing musical instruments. Mama was making jewelry, my father has a golden hand—he can make anything with his hands,” she says. “I was always surrounded by people doing interesting artistic things, so I was doing them all the time.”

At university and graduate school, it was Japanese language and literature Davydova studied, not art (she has an M.A. in the subject). Until six years ago, she’d never even taken a ceramics class.

When she finally did, she was blindsided by the medium's power.

“I fell in love with the clay and with the feeling that I can create a three-dimensional thing, but also clay can be a canvas, I can paint on it,” Davydova explains. “It can be anything. I admire this very much.”

From the clay, Davydova’s faces took on new dimensions. She molded them into vases and masks, wall sculptures and plates. Some she would leave bare, their roughshod noses and lips rising from their surface like features on a landscape. Some she’d color in tones alternately delicate and garish. Some she’d paint in detailed scenes, women in fish-scaled dresses gazing into mirrors or gliding in pairs and quartets like mermaids in the sea.

Each face is simultaneously distinct in its details—the set of the eyes, the curve of the lips, the shape of the ears—and distinctly hers, their aquiline noses a signature of Davydova’s craft. It is only because of them that we know Davydova at all. They were the ones who got her out of Ukraine.

Not long after Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, a friend sent Davydova an Instagram story. San Francisco artist Linda Fahey, owner and chief curator at Yonder Shop, was offering to host a Ukrainian artist at her Inner Richmond ceramic studio.

Davydova—who by then had sought refuge in western Ukraine, then Poland, then Berlin— took a chance and contacted her. Escaping wasn’t so much for herself, she says. It was for her daughter. In Kyiv, “it’s everyday bombing and air sirens all the time. I want her to have a childhood.”

Fahey invited Davydova into Yonder’s fold and the mother moved across the world with her husband and child. They’ve now been here almost two years. “I was extremely lucky and I do not forget about this every second I am in San Francisco,” says Davydova.

Despite the stark differences between the two cities, Davydova’s work has resonated similarly in SF and Kyiv. Her faces take on a life of their own that varies based on the cultural and personal perspectives of those who interact with them. At the same time, they speak to a struggle that’s become a near universal epidemic: loneliness.

“Even when surrounded by other people, there’s this feeling of loneliness,” Davydova explains. “I think I was very much in that kind of a state, also. My sculptures and vases were my companions.”

By embracing Davydova’s work, San Francisco has given the artist a new way out of the solitude. “I have a lot of support here as an artist and as a human, as a woman, as a mother. It’s a pure joy to be among this community.”

It’s hard for Davydova to talk about Ukraine. These are not just troubled times, she says, they are times of resilience and hope. “People in Ukraine are incredible. Something is ruined every day, some people die every day, but people still keep on doing what they were doing and support the economy and each other and, of course, the army.”

Davydova, too, continues to support her homeland from abroad in any way she can. In the meantime she, her family, and her faces get a second chance at self-expression.

// Shop Daria's pieces at Yonder Shop, 701 11th Ave. (Inner Richmond), yondershop.com, and online at daria-davydova.com.