Trees of life born from rubble: artist creates mosaics from glass shattered by Russian missiles
Artist Valentyna Huk decorates the streets of Kharkiv with mosaics she has created herself. Today, six patterns made from the debris of windows that did not withstand Russian shelling hang on the city's buildings. Valentyna spends several weeks of painstaking work on each one, starting with searching for pieces of glass in the ruins and ending with assembling them into unusual “puzzles.” The artist showed Frontliner how sharp shards become “loud” street art under her delicate fingers.
“I always wanted to do some street art for the city, and with the start of the full-scale invasion, that desire grew. I was convinced that we had to show how the war was causing us to lose our historical values, traumatizing us, breaking us in some way, because they were trying to destroy us. But despite this, we were not losing ourselves and were continuing to live and fight for everything we had in every aspect of our lives. This impulse resonated with me, but I couldn’t find that new idea. Just painting on walls wasn’t interesting. And then something happened almost right under my windows. My balcony was blown into the apartment by a blast wave. I lived with friends for a few days and didn’t see what had happened to my home — I was afraid to come back and see that nothing was left of my apartment. When I finally decided to go, I saw glass from my balcony on my floor. At that moment, I realized that this was it,” recalls Valentyna Huk.
The girl thought through the technical details of the art project on her way to the hardware store—she didn’t take time to “weigh and think it over,” deciding to start working on the mosaic that same day.
“At home, I didn’t think I needed an idea, I was just fired up. So, on my way to the store, I thought I probably needed plaster for the tiles and glue. I made my first mosaic for myself.
Then I spent several months thinking about how to scale the project to Kharkiv. That is, how to make the patterns water- and frost-resistant, how they should look on the street, how to create patterns based on our historical paintings,” says the artist.
The glass comes from buildings destroyed by Russian missiles that should have continued to exist.
The glass shards no longer cut the artist’s skin — Valentyna has learned to work with them without spilling her blood.
“I unfold it, select it, press it, and pick it up,” explains the young woman.
She sorts through the fragments for her stained glass windows and even washes them by hand, without gloves, as they get in the way.
After so many mosaics, it is quite difficult to cut yourself — it takes not just a careless but a deliberate movement. However, Valentyna is not immune to microcuts. But she admits that they do not bother her.
The glass pieces in all the bizarre shapes that can be seen in Valentyna huk’s mosaics are “unique” — the artist does not change their shapes or colors (only adding accents in blue or black). Therefore, the process of laying out the pattern is quite tiring — up to two days of work by hand. There are not many large details in the mosaic, so the drama is enhanced by the small fragments and the effort spent on them. In general, each mosaic “costs” the artist up to two weeks of work.
“I didn’t have an idea to make a mosaic out of anything. The glass used to form the patterns comes from iconic buildings – the State Industry Building, the Palace of Labor, buildings destroyed by rockets on Chernyshivska Street and Nezalezhnosti Avenue. In other words, from locations that people know and care about, that have value and should continue to exist,” says the artist.
At the same time, Valentyna Huk thinks that the mosaics of the Tree of Life project are unlikely to remain on the streets of Kharkiv for long — after all, it is street art, and it should “live very quickly, but very brightly,” rather than “live forever.” So if, at some point, the glass patterns resonate with residents or visitors to the city and evoke at least some emotion, that will be exactly what she wanted to achieve when rummaging through the broken glass near the ruins.
“Sometimes people don’t understand why I do this — collecting glass, rummaging through debris, hanging mosaics around the city. I try to explain that this is an artistic cry about the life that the Russians are trying to take away from us. Some people understand and appreciate the mosaics, while others are categorically against me hanging them on the house where they live,” the artist notes.
The Kharkiv resident adds that she would not have started creating mosaics from the debris of history and rocket strikes without the full-scale invasion. But now it makes a lot of sense — at least so that people can see that something unique and bright can be made out of pain, rather than just living with it.
“The Tree of Life project is part of our struggle for ethnicity, for Ukraine, which the occupiers are trying to destroy. The rich value of the mosaic lies not in its visual appearance, but in its essence. They are destroying us, but we are creating,” explains Valentynа Huk.
Text: Alina Yevych, adapted by Jared Goyette;
Photos: Marharyta Fal
