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The presented artworks include:

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Figure with Flowers #…, February 2024

“I collect and dry herbaria – my home is filled with plants that carry symbolic meaning for me.”

In February, around Maria’s birthday, she returned to Kyiv after two years of living in exile across Europe. As a gift to herself, she decided to undergo a full medical examination. At that time, her physical and psychological state was extremely fragile; she could barely walk and was living under the shadow of a possible cancer diagnosis. Later, it turned out that it was not cancer, but a pre-diabetic condition provoked by severe emotional stress – the body had simply reached its limit. That evening, following her intuition, she ordered a large number of roses. “My entire room was covered in them,” she recalls. “I started drying them – not only for myself but also for my mother, as a kind of celebration of life, because I didn’t know if I would survive.” Soon after, she read the devastating news that Yan Kvylinskyi – Ukraine’s leading rose breeder, founder of Kvylinskyi’s Garden, who even developed new rose varieties named after his wife – had been killed on the battlefield in January 2024 while defending Avdiivka. His wife later closed the family business, unable to bear the loss. By coincidence, Maria became one of the last people to buy those roses – flowers that no longer exist. “I didn’t add a single artificial flower,” she says. “Only the dried ones. And something happened: they began to burn from within, turning into small coals.” The sculpture became gray and somber, its surface marked with tiny holes that the artist tried to seal to keep the flowers from rotting. From afar, they look like decomposed matter, but upon closer view, one can still see the delicate translucence of petals. This is a memorial sculpture – a quiet requiem to fragility, death, and the continuity of beauty.

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Pregnant 2. Roses and Shell Casings, from the series After Death Comes Life

This figure carries within it the residues of the artist’s earlier work, the remnants of a soap sculpture she created for the National Fine Arts  Museum in Odesa in 2019. Back then, she could only use artificial flowers; real ones wilted too quickly. Those same artificial roses remained with her, silent witnesses of an earlier self, an earlier grief. “At the time,” she recalls, “that sculpture was the saddest work I had ever made. But even that sadness cannot compare to the one I feel now.” In the new, this time pregnant sculpture, Maria decided to return to those flowers – not as decoration, but as vessels of memory. Unlike before, she infused them with what she calls a “gentler energy”, an attempt at reconciliation, at quiet joy, at life continuing despite everything. Roses thus becomes a dialogue between two timelines of the same body: the woman she once was and the woman who continues to survive. The artificial roses, once symbols of imitation, now serve as fragile mediators between authenticity and artifice, loss and rebirth. Here, flowers no longer simply adorn the body; they become the body. They hold within them all the layers of life that persist after death; layers that ache, rot, glow, and continue to transform.

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Pregnant 3. Ears of Wheat and Shell Casings, from the series After Death Comes Life

This work reflects on the events of 2023/2024, when Ukrainian farmers’ products were blocked at the Polish border - an act that evoked, for Maria, memories of the collective, transgenerational trauma of the Holodomor. She recalls her grandmother’s stories and how she could never pass by abandoned ears of wheat lying on the road without grief. The wheat used in this piece was collected in her mother’s village. The artist embedded it into the sculpture’s chest and abdomen, together with fragments of exploded mines, bomb shards, and large shell casings sent anonymously from Izium, Bakhmut, and Avdiivka. These remnants of war became part of the sculpture’s internal skeleton – a literal and symbolic embodiment of endurance and transformation. “When I poured epoxy resin over the wheat,” says Maria, “a chemical reaction began – corrosion, and the sculpture darkened, becoming heavy, dirty, melancholic.” Here, life and death are inseparable: fertility and decay merge into a single body of memory.