“Light Through the Shards”
For hours I sat motionless over the canvas, holding the needle in uncertain fingers. The world seemed so cruel that even my gaze, it seemed, could wound her face — that defenceless tenderness I wanted to touch only with a feather, not with a hand.
A grandmother’s fear slowly entered the work — to shield her granddaughter from every prick of fate. The canvas under my hands stopped being fabric — it became living, warm, almost like her child’s skin. I could not make the first puncture; it seemed the sharp steel would hurt her, as if every movement of the needle across her face would be one more wound in our torn world.
But one day, during yet another air-raid alert, I understood: not to embroider her would mean surrendering to the darkness. I do not want my granddaughter to inherit my fear instead of my strength.
I began to gather her image piece by piece, as if stitching together a broken mirror of hope. Every scrap of fabric became an island of quiet I was winning for her. Every stitch became a quiet prayer. Thread by thread I tried to embroider time itself — the time she was born into.
I deliberately did not make the face perfectly smooth. In days when hearts are broken, a false wholeness would be a lie. I left the seams open and the lines broken. And now, when I look at the portrait, I do not see shards — I see the places where light breaks through the cracks; the light war is unable to touch.
Perhaps this is how the future is born: not out of what happened to survive, but out of what proved stronger than the destruction.
This is a story about my granddaughter. About Ukraine. About love that takes up a needle to sew a torn world back together, stitch by stitch.
- YEAR
- MATERIALOrganza, DMC cotton
- TECHNIQUEDouble-sided stitch
- SIZE28 × 42 cm
- COUNTRYUkraine
