Olha Pryymak

Olha Pryymak’s practice is, in part, a method of coping with the grief brought forth by current events in her home country of Ukraine. Under challenging circumstances, Pryymak’s passion for plant-life has been reignited; a long-standing fascination that harks back to her experience of growing up working the land and practising household herbalism. Through a multidisciplinary practice, she revisits childhood memories and inherited knowledge anew.

For Olha, plants are both a medium and a protagonist: a vehicle for storytelling and the matter from which the works are derived. Through both paintings and performances, she investigates the symbolic resonances, medicinal uses and cultural histories of certain flora and fauna. Within this, a sustained area of exploration is the various relationships humans have cultivated with plants throughout history and in many different locations, inspired by the writings of scholars such as Donna Haraway.

Her work ironically acknowledges the historical hierarchy of genres imposed on artistic practice; she creates pieces that appear as still life scenes but are instead intended to be very much ‘alive’. They challenge the idea of stillness and preservation at play in traditional still life works, instead entangling notions of the living and dead to remind the viewer of the fleeting quality of our natural world, of the inevitable passing of life and the violence that has played a key role in the negotiation of coexistence between plants and humans. Her works monumentalise plant-life within a context of absence, loss and death to call for the return to a more symbiotic exchange between humanity and the natural world.