Essay: by Olha Barvynka
"Seams of Movement"
07.2025
In recent months, movement has returned to me. Not only physical - though that was the first signal, the first flicker of energy flowing through my body again. But more importantly, another kind of movement emerged - verbal, mental, sensory. And with it came writing. Writing had been absent for a long time, almost as long as my body had been.
To write again is to sew. For me, text is a thread that connects fabric fragments - scattered pieces of thought, experience, memory, interests, and emotions. They don’t form a shape at first, but when I begin to write, I stitch them together. A surface emerges - a canvas, a river, something whole that brings clarity. Clarity as a form of healing. Writing essays became easy again because writing itself became a form of movement - and movement is proof that I exist. That I am returning.
I needed to reframe my experience through structure. Structure became a counterweight to instability. At first, it showed up in daily life - breakfasts, lists, moving through a schedule. Then it appeared in art. The modular structure of painting allowed me to hold the fragments. It didn’t force them into a final form, but it kept them together. It was an attempt to gather myself - not by gluing pieces back together, but by gently placing them side by side, allowing them to breathe. Modularity is not only a compositional logic - it is a gesture of trust in the future: something can always be rearranged, rethought, found again.
Fragmentation is not about destruction - it's about choosing what survives. These paintings have no center. Like the body after loss, they seek balance between parts. They speak of fear and memory, of the threshold between escape and presence. The surfaces hold at the seams - that is where the life is.
In a way, this series of paintings is my map of escape and return. I don’t separate the personal and the political: my anxiety is rooted in war, in trauma, in violence, in the splitting of trust. But the painting doesn’t illustrate this directly. Instead, it creates a space where these states can be present - in texture, in silence, in repetition.
My exhibition this week is a closure. Not only of the project, but of a particular life chapter. I feel I’ve said everything I needed to say through this series. This body of work was born from anxiety, from fleeing, from attempts at restoring wholeness. And now, as I feel a new movement beginning inside me - I know the next form will be different. Perhaps a different material. A different breath.
But it is writing that helped me realise this. And I leave this text as a trace - not of a state, but of a transition.
