This photo, one of a series, reimagines the ancient Ukrainian motanka—a protective ritual doll with no face—as a living woman cloaked in ceremony and history.
She stands in the wheat field as witness, as prayer, as memory. Her face is veiled by sacred ribbons. Her body wears traditional embroidery. Her hands cradle wheat—the symbol of both nourishment and suffering in Ukraine’s history.
The images in this series show a transformation: from invocation to embodiment, from control to surrender. In one image she reaches skyward; in another, she is grounded, collapsed into the grain.
The photographs were created in exile, but they grow from the soil of heritage.
They are not a reenactment, but a reclaiming.
They speak of freedom not as a state, but as an ancestral pulse: the freedom to remember, to mourn, and to remain.
