Olha Pryymak

The Sunflower project traced the first nine months of the 2022 war: growing sunflowers from the seed with Olha's parents displaced to East London, telling their story haptically through planting, writing and painting; painting being the most persistent form of archival culture. To keep a clear head from the grief over what was going on - Olha looked to plants. 

It's always been about the plants, the family having worked on land, practising household herbalism. The initial attack on Crimea and Donbass in 2014 felt like an attack on collective identity. Plants that arrived from the family still then back in Ukraine  in care packages became the only tangible and real roots to hold on to, they became main protagonists of the painting and the medium in tea sessions - participatory performances where participants get to experience the plant with multiple senses: touch, smell and taste. 

Through these staged encounters over tea, cultural meanings of plants became prominent: specifically cultural histories steeped in folk traditions of meaning making - the prism through which to look at life when things get hard, a lot of it as a survival mechanism: foraging, growing, nourishing and conjuring, marking passage of time, venerating the dead. Painting for Olha is one such mechanism - the plants being its main protagonists and placeholders of memories and evolving narratives, but also of hope and resilience.  

Click here for more information and work on this project.