“Figure with Flowers #…, February 2024”

“I collect and dry herbaria – my home is filled with plants that carry symbolic meaning for me.”

In February, around Maria’s birthday, she returned to Kyiv after two years of living in exile across Europe. As a gift to herself, she decided to undergo a full medical examination. At that time, her physical and psychological state was extremely fragile; she could barely walk and was living under the shadow of a possible cancer diagnosis. Later, it turned out that it was not cancer, but a pre-diabetic condition provoked by severe emotional stress – the body had simply reached its limit. That evening, following her intuition, she ordered a large number of roses. “My entire room was covered in them,” she recalls. “I started drying them – not only for myself but also for my mother, as a kind of celebration of life, because I didn’t know if I would survive.” Soon after, she read the devastating news that Yan Kvylinskyi – Ukraine’s leading rose breeder, founder of Kvylinskyi’s Garden, who even developed new rose varieties named after his wife – had been killed on the battlefield in January 2024 while defending Avdiivka. His wife later closed the family business, unable to bear the loss. By coincidence, Maria became one of the last people to buy those roses – flowers that no longer exist. “I didn’t add a single artificial flower,” she says. “Only the dried ones. And something happened: they began to burn from within, turning into small coals.” The sculpture became gray and somber, its surface marked with tiny holes that the artist tried to seal to keep the flowers from rotting. From afar, they look like decomposed matter, but upon closer view, one can still see the delicate translucence of petals. This is a memorial sculpture – a quiet requiem to fragility, death, and the continuity of beauty.