“Seven Figures of Light”

This is a portrait of a child sitting very quietly and looking straight ahead with calm eyes. Her hands are folded in her lap — as if she knows how to wait, knows how to listen, as if she carries knowledge for which there are no words yet.

Her eyes are large and attentive. That is how children born at a time when the world sounds different sometimes look. They do not yet understand events, but they feel the mood of the world with great precision. There is always a little more silence in their eyes.

Behind her sits a large bear. Not simply a toy. He is like a mountain, like a wall, like a house you can put your arms around — like someone who stands quietly behind your back and does not let the world come too close.

And behind the bear — geometric forms: triangles, rhombuses, planes of light. They look like fragments of something enormous and invisible. As if this were not simply a background, but the space she came from.

I call them the seven figures of light. Seven things I would like to leave them — the children born in war: courage, so they can live; memory, so they know who they are; laughter, so they do not turn to stone; patience, so they have the strength to grow; a road, so there is always somewhere to go; a song, because a people lives as long as it has a song; love, because without it nothing else has meaning.

I embroider these portraits because it is not the war I want to keep. I want to keep their faces while they are still children. Their looks, their silence, their presence in this world.

Embroidery is very slow work. Stitch by stitch, thread by thread. And as I embroider I think that one day these children will grow up. And perhaps they will not want to remember everything. But I want a testimony to remain with them: that they were small, that they were loved, that they were kept safe, that someone always stood behind their backs.

The thread passes through the fabric the way time passes through a life. It joins what was to what will be. And perhaps that is why these children have such eyes — as if they already carry light that someone kept for them in very dark times.

These are not simply portraits of children. They are portraits of memory. And portraits of love.

• YEAR

  2025
• MATERIAL

  Organza, DMC cotton
• TECHNIQUE

  Double-sided stitch
• SIZE

  26 × 39 cm
• COUNTRY

  Ukraine