“While the World Stands Guard”

I embroider this child as if I were touching the darkness itself and asking it to step back. Stitch by stitch. Breath by breath.

She was born when the sky learned to tear silence apart with sirens. Her first dreams are fragile bridges between air-raid alerts. Her first music is not a lullaby but the whisper of adults: “Everything will be all right… only sleep.” And in that “sleep” lives all the tiredness of the world, all its love and all its prayer.

She sleeps pressed against her bear. He is large, broken, assembled from planes — like the world after an explosion: cut, divided, torn apart, and gathered all the same, sewn together, holding all the same.

Tracing his outlines with thread, I think of everyone who stands between her and the darkness. Of those on guard — at the front, in hospitals, in cold flats without electricity. Of those who do not sleep so that she can close her eyes without fear. Her sleep is their work; her quiet is their sleepless night.

Outside the window — the night city. Squares of warm windows glow like hearts that refuse to go out. The moon hangs above the roofs like an eye that sees everything and quietly promises: “I am here, I will not turn away.”

But the most important thing is her breathing, even and trusting. Because in a war sleep is not simply a need of the body; it is an act of faith, the courage to let yourself not be afraid, if only for a few hours.

I embroider her cheeks, gentle as light at dawn. Her fingers are relaxed, open. And with every stitch I feel that I am trying to hold something larger than an image. I am trying to hold the world, to gather it from fragments, to draw light out of darkness, to make a form out of what was torn apart.

This work is not about war. It is about what is stronger than war. About love that does not shout but holds. About light that does not go out even at night. About the adults who stand guard over a child’s sleep.

While she sleeps, we are still holding on. While her sleep is deep, our future is breathing.

• YEAR

  2025
• MATERIAL

  Organza, DMC cotton
• TECHNIQUE

  Double-sided stitch
• SIZE

  35 × 35 cm
• COUNTRY

  Ukraine