I had wanted to get to the Ukrainian Renaissance exhibition at Worthing Museum since before Christmas, but something always seemed to come up at the last moment to scupper my plans. When I eventually made it over to Worthing at the beginning of this month, it was the very last day of the exhibition.
On a rather bleak and grey Friday afternoon, I seemed to be the only visitor to the gallery where the work of Ukrainian artists living in Sussex was being exhibited. The silence was broken only by the sound of children playing nearby, while I stood and absorbed the images on the walls surrounding me – many of fragmentation, loss and anger but also of joy and celebration. The artists’ biographies gave a glimpse of a world once secure and predictable, suddenly shattered and uprooted.
Co-curator and painter Yaroslava Matvieienko told me how the idea for an exhibition of Ukrainian art and craft first came about. It was the brainchild of Mike Tyler, a local philanthropist and businessman who founded the Worthing Ukrainian Friends Network.
“It was about 18 months in the brewing”, Matvieienko explained. “Mike realised that there was a concentration of very talented and creative people who had come from Ukraine to Sussex at the outbreak of the war. There are particularly strong Ukrainian communities in Worthing and Brighton.” She and co-curator Irma Latsanych put out a call for artists and registered everyone who came forward: “We wanted to include everyone, as I know how demotivating rejection can be.”
Powerful images
So many of the works struck me powerfully, such as the strong black and red slashing of the painting ‘All or nothing’ by Ann Mary Latsanych, known as Maru, with its smattering of bloodstains, a disembodied beautifully manicured hand reaching out across the canvas, and another strangely distorted fist holding a lighter to a missing section of the painting.
Or Svitlana Mykhaylova-Melnychenko’s trilogy ‘Information Space’, one of which is a collage with jumbled phrases rising from a woman’s head: ‘never again’, ‘steel plant defenders’, ‘phosphorus bombs’. In her biographical statement the artist says, “Over time, apathy and hopelessness grows. Avoiding watching and reading news from Ukraine, I began to come to terms with what happened and what still awaits. Future plans are still unclear.”
Loss and uncertainty
Photographer Evgeniia Panurova’s images had a stillness and reflectiveness about them but also carried an immense poignancy. She was born in Mariupol and her mentor at the Mariupol School of Photography, Dmytro Chychera, who volunteered with the army, went missing in the spring of 2022 in the city – a city, as she says in her statement, that no longer exists. ‘Sketch-Up’ is a photograph of a flight of stone steps bordered by autumnal trees, the steps disappearing at their height into a blur of mist. Entirely simple, and yet immensely evocative of sadness, loss and uncertainty.
One of the most haunting images was Iryna Holoshchapova’s portrait of a Ukrainian soldier, the brother of one of her students. “I was struck by his kind, tired eyes that had seen a lot”, writes Iryna. He stares straight at you, his eyes apprehensive, sad. And you wonder whether he was about to go into battle, and if he is still alive…
Animals, embroidery and motanka dolls
One of the delights of the exhibition was the diversity of the work on show, with the youngest artist, Yaryna Zakaliuzhna, exhibiting five watercolours of animals, each with a story to tell. Shafa, the wonderfully grumpy Persian cat, glaring out from one painting, was found in the rubble of a building in Borodianka destroyed by Russian troops. She had endured a month hiding in the wreckage of her home and was eventually rescued by emergency teams and reunited with her owners. Yaryna says of her: “Her name Shafa, (‘Glory’ in Ukrainian) pays tribute to Borodianka’s tenacious spirit.”
Included in the exhibition were colourful examples of traditional Ukrainian dress and head-dresses of intertwined blossoms, as well as delicate embroidery work. Tetiana Chekhovska-Kostsova displayed her motanka dolls, the tradition of creating these talismanic figures going back thousands of years. Tetiana says of her dolls, “The motanka is a symbol of my people: now we are calm and soft, like cloth, but strong when there is a goal – to endure, to win.”
Future exhibition plans
Many of the Ukrainians in Sussex have now found jobs and are settling into their lives in the UK, so the number of people available to volunteer to help with future exhibitions and events has diminished. In spite of this, curator Matvieienko has ambitious plans for the future.
The Worthing Ukrainian Friends Network has received a lot of support from local MPs over the past two years, and Matvieienko is hoping that she can call on them to sponsor an exhibition of work by Ukrainian artists in the Palace of Westminster. “I keep myself busy”, she says, “as many Ukrainians and those who support us here do, to be able to help our country as much as we can even from here.”
You can only hope that one day, not too far into the future, she will be able to return to a Ukraine reborn and at peace. In the meantime, she and her compatriots are contributing so much to the artistic and cultural life of this small part of the UK.
Postscript: Yaroslava Matvieienko was one of a group of women who took part in a creative writing course as a form of therapy for women caught up in the war, and the resultant short stories and essays have just been collected and published in Ukrainian as, ‘I Don’t Know How to Write About it’. They would love to find a publisher interested in publishing an English version of the book.
Ukrainian Friends Network and Worthing 4 Refugees and other organisations in Sussex are organising a number of events to mark the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On Sunday 25 February, from 3.00pm, All Saints Hove is hosting a Ukraine Memorial Day.
