“Silent Soil - Ukraine’s unsung front” is a new chapter in my artistic practice and it touches the themes of war and ecology. It is a project created specifically for the ecocenter Krtek in Vrchlabi, starting with a question "what happens with the landscape after local people exodus as a war consequence"?

In order to have any artistic statement, I started with research. Although, being Ukrainian-born and witnessing the consequences of war for my family friends was enough to create personal emotional work, I wanted to go deeper and base by art on solid facts and statistics. I've collected official stats from Ukrainian Ministry of Environment, volunteer ecological organizations and published scientific articles, read journalistic reports and investigations, satellite photography, as well as articles of agricultural societies and journals. In total, I addressed a few dozen various informational sources in Ukrainian, English and Polish.

Visually I aimed to address the scale and the impact of military russian aggression on Ukraine ́s territory, its land and endangered species specifically. How the landscapes changed under occupation and battles, what species are there no more and how can chemicals from weapons and military vehicles, absorbed by soil affect future harvests, ecosystems and our future generations eventually. The symbolism and actual realism of soil, which is the source of life and collector of memory, was my guiding inspiration for creating works for this exhibition.

The result of this research is a series of 12 mixed-media works on canvas, one of them being as large as 170x140 cm. This centerpiece of the exhibition is called "What they sow" and is an abstract mixed-media artwork on raw canvas, resembling the cratered Ukrainian fields, as seen on satellite pictures. The rest of the artworks in the series reflect on various edges of the consequences of the invasion and constant firing for soil and landscapes, like heavy metal and chemical pollution.

The second chapter of the show - Inner Landscapes is a more intimate topography, rooted in the my childhood memories and sensed connection to homeland. The series started in early 2022 short before the war with vague unrest and hope for peace. Most works feature naive scenes and dreamlike colours and evoke places that exist less on a map than in the body, some paintings were immediate reactions to the shelling of civilian infrastructure.

Together these two parts create a dialogue between factual devastation and inner resilience, soft resistance to the horrors of war, asking viewers to hold both realities at once: the wounded ground we can measure, and the invisible homeland we carry within.