— Eva, shall we choose the most beautiful photos together, okay?

— Yes, let's do it. I like this one—oh, but there are needles inside… Why are there needles? I'm scared of that. Mom, why are there so many needles here? Mom, take them away.

— These aren't needles, Eva; they’re shell casings.

— But why???

"Shell Casings and Flowers," 2021, 2022–2024

‍Sculptures cast from ballistic soap—exact replicas of my hands and feet. Inside them are flowers and shell casings from spent bullets. This unfinished series is about a wounded body that remembers places one cannot forget, about war and occupation that change everything. It speaks to something deeply personal, something that cannot be voiced aloud without reopening scars that still burn with electricity.

Most of the flowers and grasses hidden inside the sculptures were collected together with my beloved and co-creator during the summer of 2020 on the Arabat Spit—a narrow strip of land at the northern edge of the Kerch Peninsula, which at the time was still free. I stood there, on a tiny piece of "home," looking at the lights of houses that had long been under occupation. I thought about my grandmother, who lives there—90 kilometers away from the invisible border. I brought my husband there as if bringing him "home," to introduce him to the grandmother who raised me.

The Arabat Spit was then a place where, even briefly, one could return to childhood: the scent of the steppe, the rustling of grasses, the color of the soil, the temperature of the Azov Sea; the taste of dried mullet and the sweetest tomatoes from the gardens of local laborers; the voices of cicadas and horseflies, and the purple-pink horizons of salt lakes…

In 2022, this very region became the starting point of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The Arabat Spit has been occupied since February 2022, and this land has become the heart of the war, the launching point for Russian heavy artillery. I dream that my grandmother will survive and wait for me… Since October 2022, I have had no direct contact with her.

The shell casings for my first sculptures were purchased on the black market in 2021, brought from Eastern Ukraine. Since 2022, remnants of the war have been passed on to me by soldiers, their families, and the comrades of Defenders from active combat zones: Bakhmut, Izium, Kharkiv Oblast, Kyiv Oblast… Fragments of mines, machine-gun belts, shell casings—this is life, this is death, this is history, this is pain, and these are testimonies. This is the Greatest Gift: to give one’s life for the sake of others.