“Children Born in War” is both a personal and a collective narrative about Ukrainian childhood that begins its life to the sound of air-raid sirens.
The project emerged with the birth of my granddaughter, who entered the world at a time when our country lived in a constant state of alert. For almost a year, I could not bring myself to create her portraits — it felt like intruding into the fragile silence where small children learn to exist between explosions. With time, I realized that this silence is precisely where resilience is born.
These textile portraits are my way of “gathering with threads the fragments of a broken life,” restoring presence where war tries to erase it. The child’s face is not only a portrait of my granddaughter; it is a symbolic image of an entire generation that did not choose war yet already knows how to live in spite of it. Embroidery becomes more than a technique — it is a meditation, a way of speaking about what defies language: fear, trembling hope, and the fragile beauty of everyday survival.
The project grows together with the child. Each new portrait becomes a document of time, an inner diary, a testimony to how light continues to be born even in the darkest eras.
It is a story about love that withstands destruction.
A story about Ukraine holding on — for its children.
