I’m honoured to be featured in the Ukrainian magazine The Woman, where I share my journey as an artist and as a Ukrainian woman living and creating in Australia. The article reflects on my creative path, the experiences that shaped my practice, and the way art has helped me stay connected to both place and identity while building a life on the other side of the world.
Living between two countries has taught me that connection to homeland doesn’t disappear with distance — it transforms. Through my work, I carry memories, values, and cultural references from Ukraine into my life in Australia, creating a quiet dialogue between the two. Art becomes a bridge, linking landscapes, histories, and emotional ties across continents, and allowing me to feel grounded in both places at once.
It is always meaningful to see this story resonate beyond my immediate community, especially when it reaches readers who may recognise their own experiences of migration, belonging, and cultural memory. I’m grateful to the editorial team for their interest and thoughtful approach to telling my story.
Mosaic has always fascinated me for its quiet complexity. There is something magical in planning to deconstruct a design into small pieces, only to assemble it again into a new whole. Each fragment carries its own presence, yet only truly comes alive in relationship to the others. Our eye moves naturally along the lines between the pieces, enjoying the rhythm of separation as much as the image they form together. We see the individual elements, the design they create collectively, and the spaces in between — all at once. That simultaneous experience is what makes mosaic so compelling to me: multifaceted, layered, and endlessly engaging. Beyond its visual richness, mosaic surfaces are also wonderfully practical. They are not afraid of a hot cup, a wet glass, a scratch, or a spill. This combination of beauty and durability is what makes mosaic especially appealing to me — art that can be lived with, touched, and used every day.
Knowing your tools deeply — how they behave, how they age, how they respond to light and heat — changes the way you work and the confidence with which you make decisions. During my time at Azur Studio in Kyiv, we took part in a number of art trips across Europe, visiting paint and medium manufacturers directly. These experiences were invaluable. Being able to ask questions about materials from the people who created them — the chemists, designers, and technicians behind the products — gave us insights no manual or catalogue ever could. Who could know the materials better than those who developed them? Along the way, we also participated in workshops with local designers who introduced us to the full potential of different gels and pastes, transparent and opaque paints, and specialised products for textile decoration and pseudo stained glass. We explored techniques for creating patina, working with gilding, and layering surfaces in ways that expanded both technical knowledge and creative possibility. I often find myself missing those times — being surrounded by like-minded professionals, travelling, learning, experimenting, and talking endlessly about what we loved most: paint, surface, and decoration. Those journeys shaped not only my technical approach, but also my respect for materials as active partners in the creative process.
