Series “Tulips Bought from an Elderly Woman in Kharkiv in May 2025”

This series was born from a simple gesture — the purchase of tulips from an elderly woman at a market in Kharkiv. In this act there was something more than an exchange: the transmission of a fragile sign of care, survival, and community in times of war.

Cast in transparent polyester resin with inclusions of healing herbs, the tulips preserve not their natural beauty, but a state of transition — between life and memory, between the everyday and the ritual. These are flowers that no longer carry fragrance and will never wither: they have lost the ability to be alive, yet they have gained another dimension — becoming capsules of experience, talismans in a world where fragility itself turns into a survival strategy.

The tulips appear as offerings without a deity, ritual remnants that point both to the memory of loss and to the possibility of new growth. Within them lies the sense of a temporary ghost-home, one without walls but still holding traces of presence.

This work grows out of an attempt to accept one’s own vulnerability as the only support. Here tulips are not symbols of spring and renewal, but witnesses of war and exile. They offer an artificial happiness, yet at the same time remain transparent reminders that life continues to sprout even from the fragments of loss.