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War Rugs. Collage with fabrics. 2022.

These tapestries express my pain, grief and my commitment and love to Ukraine since the Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022. I’ve heard someone told, that we, Ukrainians, should look on the flowers between watching the news; that beauty of flowers can heal. Flowers momentarily connected in my mind with cemetery and death. Flowers in my quilt “Why war?” are associated with grief and new cemeteries that emerged throughout Ukraine, as well as mass graves of killed Ukrainian civilians, defenders, and children. Another quilt refers to Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s novel “Ukraine in Flame” of 1943, drawing a parallel with the Ukrainian experience of the Second World War that a generation of my grandparents went through. The quilt “A cuckoo flew through my house” draws upon a Ukrainian folk song about a cuckoo, symbolizing mother. In my rug, the injured cuckoo-mother represents Motherland with an open wound.