WHERE IS MY HOME?

Originally trained as an economist, Irina had long nurtured a creative life alongside her professional one, quietly experimenting with analogue photography, painting, textiles, and installation. But in 2023, she took a leap into full-time artistic practice, and within a remarkably short time, her voice as an artist has found resonance across Europe and beyond.

Her work has been shown at the Gonzalez Martí National Museum of Ceramics (Valencia), the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia (Rome), and the DongGang Museum of Photography (Korea), among others. In 2024, she was featured in the publication 100 Contemporary Ukrainian Photographers by Form.Paris.

What draws you to the arts?

Art has always lived quietly inside me, even when life took me in very different directions. When I was ten, I dreamed of becoming an artist, but I grew up hearing that art wasn’t serious, respectable, or something you could build a life around. So I followed a more traditional path — I earned a degree in economics and spent nearly two decades working in international business. But even then, art never left me. I painted, sewed, built installations, experimented with photography, and even studied botanical illustration. Creativity was my way of staying connected to something real and meaningful — though for many years, it remained just a hobby. Everything changed in 2022. After losing my father, my home, and my job in Ukraine, I found myself in a moment of deep personal crisis and disorientation. In that moment, art — especially photography — became more than a passion. It became a lifeline and helped me process loss, grief, and the dislocation of migration. That experience taught me something essential: art has the power to hold us when nothing else can. Whether I’m visiting a museum, watching a performance, or making something with my own hands, I feel grounded, present, and connected — to myself, to others, to something deeper than language. It’s not just what I do — it’s how I find meaning, how I heal, and how I find my way through life.

What did you like best about this photography project?

My work navigates the fragile terrain of memory and psychological states, where images become vessels for emotion and trace. Through analogue photography and collage, I engage the tactile—paper, thread, textile—as extensions of thought and touch. Materiality becomes language; lines, textures, and shapes operate as metaphors, mapping inner landscapes. This ongoing process of layering, deconstructing, and reassembling opens space for intuitive experimentation and embodied reflection, inviting viewers to connect with the invisible emotional layers beneath the surface.

The Where Is My Home? series offers self-portraits collaged with fragments of text, thread, paper, and other hand-worked elements. Each image is both fragile and deliberate, mapping a personal topography of trauma and memory. Some titles speak clearly: Wound, Broken, Let It Go. Others—Addresses, Roots, No Way Back—hint at the practical and emotional ruptures that occur when home becomes unreachable.

What makes these works resonate so deeply is not only their content, but their materiality. Threads hang, stitch, or tangle through the photographs like veins or lifelines. Paper is torn, layered, or labelled—as if trying to hold together something constantly on the verge of slipping apart. In Feelings, words are scrawled, obscured, and rearranged, mirroring the mental fragmentation that comes with grief and exile. One image in the series, titled DOK-KBP-VLC, shows a pair of open hands marked with lines, evoking both fate and cartography. The title references the airport codes for Donetsk, Kyiv, and Valencia—three cities that have shaped Irina’s sense of home and loss. The lines etched across the palms appear almost like a map of memory, tracing the emotional and geographical displacements of her life. For Irina, this photograph becomes a symbol of her “destiny lines”—a visual intersection of journey, identity, and belonging.

Though the imagery is monochrome and restrained, its emotional tone is rich. Rather than depict the chaos of war or the spectacle of crisis, Irina turns her lens inward—toward the quiet devastation of memory, the hidden places where identity is rebuilt in silence. These are not only photographs; they are visual poems, each one a small act of reconstruction.

What lingers most in Where Is My Home? is its invitation into a private, tactile emotional space—one shaped by a woman who has endured rupture, but also found new meaning through the process of artistic creation. There is grief here, yes, but also agency. The thread does not only unravel; it also repairs.

Irina’s series is a quiet call to remember those displaced not just from their geography, but from their history, language, and sense of self. It’s also a testament to the way art can help us stitch a life back together—not perfectly, but truthfully.