Steppe Ukraine. Ornament 1 Patch

*created in collaboration with the Odesa Fine Arts Museum

This is a visual archive of the South’s memory, assembled at a time when folk art still lived in everyday spaces, not only in museums.

In 1929, under the curatorship of Professor Volodymyr Zauze, an album of Ukrainian folk art was published based on expedition sketches by Olena Brychevska, a student at the Odesa Art School. She recorded the ornaments of the Odesa region as they existed in real life: on the walls of houses, stoves, and carpets—in spaces where ornament was not decoration but the language of the home.

The album included 30 plates of early-twentieth-century steppe ornament. These are rhythms of earth and wind, the geometry of an uncluttered space, signs born on plains and open horizons. The ornament of Steppe Ukraine is restrained but assured—it does not decorate; it holds the form.

The album appeared during the Soviet policy of so-called “indigenization”—a brief period when the state sought to legitimize the national cultures of the republics. At that time, Ukraine, and Odesa in particular, saw a surge in Ukrainian-language publishing and interest in folk heritage. It recorded a culture at a boundary: between a living tradition and its future displacement.

We created this patch as a continuation of that archive—not a reconstruction, but a transfer of the ornament into contemporary movement. From walls and fabrics to clothing and accessories. From the space of the home to the space of the person. It is a way to preserve the rhythm of the steppe not in a book, but in life.