Doorways of Light:
Vytynanky of Daria Alyoshkina

Daria Alyoshkina is a Ukrainian artist from Lviv, having spent her childhood in Vinnytsia region, where paper decorations called vytynanky have long been used to decorate homes. With a Master's degree in monumental and decorative sculpture from the Lviv National Academy of Arts, it was motherhood that changed Alyoshkina's practice. Working with paper allows for the flexibility of creation, and paper allows the generosity of time. Vytynanka was something Alyoshkina remembered making from her childhood and was a natural progression of the evolution of her visual language. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, vytynanka and its preservation has been at the forefront of Ukrainian traditional craft. Alyoshkina’s work utilizes the medium of cutting into paper to connect with her pattern-based visual style, as well as depictions and agency of women as the subjects of many of her pieces. 

 

Daria Alyoshkina's work touches on the ephemerality, strength, and fragility of her pieces echo the paper medium. At once intimately familiar to her audience as a material of the everyday, its decorative nature comes alive through the geometric designs in the cut designs by Alyoshkina, referencing traditional Ukrainian geometric motifs as well as her own unique visual language. The scale of her work responds to the space where it can be displayed, often hung in a banner or displayed against a window, symbolically creating doorways of imagination. The vytynanky pierce the surface, as doorways of a thousand cuts, pulling the viewer through the material surface. Light and shadow interplay across the cut surface, adding tension to the paper that the eye then navigates.

 

There is a rich, deeper understanding of the work to those familiar with Ukrainian folk stories and art, yet the female figures, birds and animals convey their own agency. Rather than a visual shorthand for a well-known story, they create their own narratives, geometrically mirrored or centred in their own work. The visual hand of Alyoshkina herself that is on the page, first sketched, then the paper is cut by hand. Alyoshkina's designs are an act of physical labour, hours spent with a sharp knife over archival paper, the tension of each cut uncovering a world beyond the paper picture plane, extending through the surface, a mythologizing moment of creation that brings together the artist and her subject matter. Women in white, red, and black paper gaze boldly from the suspended works, actively connecting with the viewer through their gaze.

 

Alyoshkina’s paper works also function as storytelling mediums, doorways into liminal spaces. Her most recent work is part of Homo Faber in Venice, "Bud of Flower" depicts the rolling sensuous lines of vines interspersed with cutwork patterns and women's faces gazing from an inner curl. The two mirror images recall not only vegetation but also a bond between design and art, the banner hangs creating a doorway through which a viewer is invited through. The scale of the work, hanging suspended, adds to the evocation of a liminal space, the power of the work as it draws the eye through the surface, almost inviting participation as an aspect of its being. 

 

At the Venice Architectural Biennale in 2023, as part of the 'Ukrainian DNA' pavilion, "Lace of Centuries", a monumental vytynanka work: twelve panels illustrating different points of Ukrainian history and traditional craft through contemporary art. Displayed as diptychs, the intricate cutwork patterns suffuse the paper surface to create pathways for the eye to travel across, and invite it through. Repeating motifs, such as waves, tree branches, or diamond patterns that recall Ukrainian embroidery dance across and around the panels, with human figures and animals finding their way in the world. The impact of light, shining through the panels, a landscape of shadows and cutwork designs, creating movement across the surface and through to the world beyond. Nine themes represented are infused with both traditional Ukrainian motifs as well as historical events, with Alyoshkina centring female figures. Alyoshkina blends history with mythologizing figures and motifs that give the impression of timelessness. They bear stories deeply rooted in the history and culture of Ukraine, but they are also present amongst us today. The panels are symbolic doorways into the liminal space of history, through which light and shadows beckon, inviting us within and through.

 

Alyoshkina’s vynynanka, suspended in the air, pierced by light and dancing shadows, create a connection between history, myth, and contemporary art, doorways creating narratives and physical impositions within the spaces where they are hung. Light travels across the cut works, and through. This piercing of the surface creates an extension of the piece that goes beyond the confines of the paper and its visual borders into the world beyond, which is the true power of vytynanka, the bridge between storytelling and imagination.

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