The End of an Era (beginning of something else...)
2023 - Ongoing
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, my sense of identity and belonging has been profoundly transformed. Though I now live away from Ukraine, my parents remain there, and I carry the constant emotional weight of distance, fear, and longing. As a Ukrainian female artist, mother, and daughter, I navigate this dual existence between safety and grief, connection and separation. My new project, The End of an Era (beginning of something else...), grows from this liminal space.
Photography has long been my language of reflection and healing. In recent years, it has become both a method of survival and a form of care. My practice began to shift after my mother suffered a heart attack, I was diagnosed with diabetes and ADHD, and my second child was born, all against the backdrop of war and displacement. These experiences made me re-evaluate how we live, love, and endure when the familiar structures of life collapse.
In response, I turned to the camera not to document tragedy, but to find grounding in the small, cyclical rituals that shape our days: cooking, sharing meals, holding my children, calling my parents, noticing the quiet poetry of the domestic space. These gestures, though ordinary, became sacred acts of resistance and continuity. Through photographing them, I began to rebuild a sense of rhythm and meaning, transforming routine into ritual and anxiety into presence.
My father’s brief visits from Odesa became another thread in this narrative. His presence, fragile, tender, and temporary, carried both comfort and melancholy. Each visit unfolded like a quiet performance: preparing food together, walking, speaking little but understanding everything. Photographing these moments became my way of holding on, of creating visual traces of a love shaped by absence and resilience.
My work explores how photography can function as both archive and emotional landscape, a space where memory, tenderness, and transformation coexist. The images are not linear narratives but fragments: sunlight on my son’s legs, lightning cutting through the sky, fruit resting on my father’s aging body. These recurring moments form a meditation on caregiving and continuity.
As the project evolved, I realised that these domestic rituals connect me to something larger, a collective, almost archetypal memory of nourishment, love, and survival, what Carl Jung described as the collective unconscious. Through these gestures, I began to sense the shared human patterns of care, fragility, and creation that transcend geography and time. Even without strong inherited traditions, I found myself creating new ones through the act of photographing. The camera became a bridge between generations, a quiet dialogue between the visible and the invisible.
The End of an Era (beginning of something else...) continues the exploration I began in Meat, Fish and Aubergine Caviar but moves into a new emotional landscape, one shaped by war, motherhood, and the search for balance between vulnerability and resilience.
Ultimately, this project is an attempt to visualise healing, to show how photography can hold both loss and renewal, and how beauty can still be found in the ordinary, even as the world around us changes irrevocably.