On March 2, 2022, I packed my life into a backpack and decided that my daughters and I must leave Kharkiv. By pure magic we managed to get a lift to the train station where we were faced with a swarm of people. There was panic. It was chaos. The station was packed with people, children, elderly people, dogs, all pushing and shoving each other. When the evacuation train arrived, …
On being a refugee… It’s the road. It’s the pain of loss. It’s hard. It’s terrifying. It’s the unknown. It’s saying good-bye to your husband. It’s losing your home. It’s loss of life. It’s new encounters. It’s wonderful people. It’s weird and nasty people. It’s meeting your best and closest friends in a foreign land. It’s tears of joy and loss. It’s envy …
The idea of carving pictures in the rocks is not new, it is thousands of years old. But it took me 42 years of my life and three weeks of the war to discover the magical world of imperfect clay carvings. The inspiration for my creativity was: the presence of a trench, clay, a sharp stick and a fierce hatred of enemies. The first works were quite rough, the stick was constantly breaking, so …
What does the soul of an airplane look like? That the soul of the Mriya will go straight to heaven, I have no doubt. Maybe it will look like the friendly dragon from one of Edith Nesbit’s stories. For me, hearing that the Mriya perished was like hearing that someone dear to me had died. I grew up on stories about the construction of the Mriya like fairytales. My dad was …
