Ulyana’s work investigates the tension between the private, inner world and experiences of the individual, and the wider, social and cultural world of which that individual is a part. This is approached through a meshing of apparently highly traditional figurative painting with radically contemporary elements. Ulyana works using traditional oil painting techniques learnt in part through copying the works of artists who have influenced her, among them Rubens, Velázquez, Duyster; but these techniques are filtered by a contemporary sensibility, manifest, for example, in a subtle undercutting of conventions of perspective, or in a modernist approach to working with colour which clashes productively with the force of traditional elements. A further important aspect of Ulyana’s work is use of mathematical formulae which have come to exist as the expressions of varied cosmologies, to determine structural elements of her compositions.