Institution
ATU Galway
Medium
Installation
Graduation Year
Class of 2026
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My artistic practice explores war trauma, displacement, memory, and identity, while seeking to create spaces for reflection, empathy, and dialogue. My work often begins with lived experience or with questions I am trying to understand, both as an individual and as part of a wider social and cultural context. As an idea-led artist who embraces experimentation and continuous learning, I find inspiration in the creative process itself, particularly in discovering the visual language that allows an idea, memory, or emotion to take form. Through video, textiles, printmaking, and painting, I investigate how memories are formed, preserved, and transformed over time. Drawing on my experience as a Mariupol survivor, my degree show project, 'Settling', focuses on the experience of war and survival from the perspective of civilians. Through repetition and testimony, I reflect on the realities of everyday life near the frontlines that often remain hidden behind maps, statistics, military reports, and media narratives. Rather than depicting war scenes directly, my work attends to their human traces: disrupted routines, altered personal and domestic spaces, fear, uncertainty, displacement, and the ongoing process of living with trauma after witnessing atrocities. 'Settling' reflects the fragile coexistence between ordinary domestic life and the realities of wartime survival. I recognise that traumatic experiences cannot always be fully translated into visual form, and my work often emerges from the tension between visibility and absence, remembrance and forgetting. Through my practice, I seek to create forms of witnessing that are intimate, personal, and often overlooked. There are recurring visual and material elements throughout my work. I frequently return to images of the sky, urban landscapes, and light. Light plays a central role in my practice, both as a visual subject and as a material element. In works such as the Source of Light, it embodies an ambiguity that can suggest both hope and threat, comfort and vulnerability. I am also influenced by traditional Ukrainian sewing and embroidery practices, where personal and collective histories are embedded in fabric. Textiles, therefore, become carriers of memory and means of intergenerational connection, linking intimate experiences with wider cultural narratives.
