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- Untamed Plants
Kateryna Savchuk
The series of sculptural objects Untamed Plants is an attempt to process the experience of war through objects of everyday life. The ceramic vases are not merely utilitarian forms but objects of memory — carriers of collective experience, trauma and continuity shaped under wartime conditions. The turn towards forms and decorative motifs characteristic of the Ukrainian ceramic tradition becomes a reflection on the transformation of Ukrainian identity: whether it can remain unchanged after war, and in what ways it shifts without losing its essence. The hand-building and ornamentation of these objects enact an effort to construct a new domestic reality — one in which decorativeness no longer serves as embellishment but becomes a means of articulating lived experience. The plant motifs in these works do not idealise nature; instead they register the reality of war: flowers continue to bloom in the earth, growing through bones, blood and death. In this sense the ceramic objects function as containers of collective and personal experience, in which memory, trauma and the experience of living through war materialise in form.
Kateryna Savchuk is a visual artist and illustrator. In 2023 she completed her Master’s degree in the Department of Monumental Art at the Mykhailo Boichuk Kyiv
State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design. From August 2023 to January 2024 she participated in the Gaude Polonia scholarship programme in Poland. In 2023 Kateryna received the World Illustration Awards and participated in group exhibitions in Ukraine, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Her artistic practice focuses on exploring sensuality and corporeality, and on the observation and documentation of transitional states — those charged moments between transformation, when one thing has not yet disappeared while another is already taking root. With a deep interest in socio-natural interaction, she examines transitional states at both collective and individual levels. In her practice she seeks the point of intersection — a space and condition — between the concrete and the abstract, the visible and the hidden, the unconscious and the conscious. Drawing on observation, diary notes and photography, she archives bodily and sensory experience — the experience of motherhood, displacement, loss, and the renegotiation of identity — and transforms it into painting and graphic series, collages and sculpture.