LANA MEL
(Svitlana Melnychenko - Mykhailova)

Artist Statement

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My artistic practice is an ongoing attempt to map the unseen internal ruptures caused by displacement, institutional silencing, and the fragmentation of memory. I do not define myself through a single medium; instead, I treat materiality as an extension of an internal monologue. Whether operating through high-fired ceramics, textiles, soft sculpture, or sound, each discipline is chosen for its specific ability to hold psychological weight and document a state of survival.

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The forced departure from my home region in Ukraine stripped away the physical coordinates of my identity, turning my practice into a space of active, intellectual resistance. I look at trauma not to evoke sentimentality or passive observation, but to dissect how geopolitical conflict reorganizes the human interiority and alters our relationship with everyday objects. Memory, in my understanding, is not a fixed archive, but a fragile, shifting landscape that can be weaponized, lost, or intentionally reclaimed.

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This investigation manifests through distinct, highly personal conceptual lines:

The Architecture of Vulnerability: Through large-scale installations with hand-sewn, non-functional garments and text, I examine the heavy friction between personal conscience and collective betrayal under the reality of occupation. In projects like 'Archives of Conscience' and 'Echolocation', the fabric becomes a second, exposed skin—a tactile record of dreams, testimonies, and quiet human endurance.

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The Strategy of Earth: In my ceramic work, specifically 'Excavations of the Future', I turn to raw, high-fired clay as a physical counterweight to displacement. By interacting with ancient visual codes and Scythian identity, I treat the earth as a storage of suppressed truths. The intense heat of the kiln is a metaphor for an absolute cleansing process—a tool to burn away the forced layers of propaganda, imperial distortion, and institutional erasure.

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The Geography of Obsession: My non-political research, such as the series of red masks, operates within the phenomenology of pure psychological isolation, analyzing the visceral boundaries of emotional exposure and human fixation through form and raw colour. 

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Ultimately, my work is a refusal to accept erasure. It is a rigorous inquiry into how a person reconstructs their internal territory and reclaims autonomy when the external world has lost its permanence.