Capriccio
Angels Look Inside
As I assembled this little house from tiny parts—pebbles or souvenirs found in second-hand shops—I thought about how each of them is more than it seems. Behind every object, there is at least a small story—a fragment of someone’s emotions, choices, and ultimately, someone’s life. I was drawn to the anonymity of these stories because it allowed me to abstract them to the level of an image. At the same time, it evoked a sense of unsettling melancholy in me—knowing these stories were lost forever.
I thought about the fragility of grand constructs, the collapse of which I have witnessed and continue to witness before my eyes. And about how their fragments still become the foundation of new life. I thought about memory. Does it become more significant when what shaped it disappears? Ultimately, I thought about what “home” really means, and how much that definition can change when it is threatened with loss.
I worked on creating this lamp for about two years (with long breaks), starting in December 2022—almost a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of my country. At that time, I was reading many stories from my fellow Ukrainians about how, in a single moment, their world of normal, cosy, carefully built life shattered. To save yourself and your children, you leave home with nothing but a backpack, not knowing if you will ever see it whole again. I was fortunate not to experience this first-hand. And yet, over the past three years, I have felt something similar every time I lock the door of my Kyiv flat before leaving on another trip.
I know stories of people who, in their frantic escape, instinctively grabbed a grandmother’s piece of jewellery or a small souvenir figurine, only realising the significance of that gesture later. And I know people who describe the destruction of their flat through the loss of their book collection or family photographs—the fragments of life that held their memory and history.
Reading these stories, I thought about how home is not brick and concrete walls. Home is the place where you are free to gather your own treasury of personally meaningful things, including small, warm little trinkets that matter only to you. And that is one of the priceless things you lose when all you have are the temporary walls of a refugee shelter.
When the war began, my reality, along with the reality of my fellow Ukrainians, was shattered into smithereens. Intuitively, as I collected these small objects, I began building walls for a tiny house—one that would hold the light of home inside.
When I look at Ukrainian people in the streets abroad, I think about how they do not look like refugees. They have adapted, covering themselves in an external “plaster” of normality. Neither I nor anyone else knows what losses and emptiness they might be carrying inside.
I covered the disparate, multicoloured fragments with a layer of papier-mâché—like plaster on a building façade. The papier-mâché itself was made from torn newspaper scraps, each containing stories that, too, will never be read again. But for me, it is important to know they are there.
Yet, the lamp has an inner side—uncovered, with scars where the pieces join. And the angels, too, look inside.
LCDF thanks Anastasiia Biletska, independent curator, for her collaboration
Lyuda Skrynnykova lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. She studied History of Art at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (Kyiv). After graduation, she worked with contemporary art as a gallery manager and then as a curator of art projects at the CSM / Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art in Kyiv. Working on other artists' projects, she realised that she had her own vision and a strong desire to embody her ideas in her own works. She became interested in creating functional design objects that could also promote her ideas, an everyday object could also become a way to provoke certain reflections and actualise certain values.
In 2022, together with Pavlo Garadzha, she launched the We Complicate project. The aim was to create objects as statements that could encourage contemplation, self-reflection, awareness of those things in life that often go unnoticed in the midst of routine and work, and do not become part of memory.