The war in Ukraine ignited memories of my Ukrainian heritage, my family’s history as refugees, and of the choices I made as I tried to leave that history behind and struggled to assimilate into a Canadian culture. The destruction and danger faced by my relatives there and by all Ukrainians, and the pride I have felt in Ukrainian resistance have made me feel grief, sadness, anger, shame and celebration–a complex tonic that I have tried to deal with in these months since February 24.
The work I’ve made since then started off from an older series of works using dictator’s watches to graphically satirize authoritarian greed and corruption. Putin’s watch was set against the Ukrainian flag symbolizing the annexation of Crimea in 2014. That earlier work has now morphed into a much different body of work “On Putin’s Watch” that tries to evoke the horror and devastation of this terrible war, using images from historical paintings about war, and working in both print and tapestry, to evoke the rich Ukrainian history of embroidery and decorative arts.
