There is a room in my grandparent’s house in a village outside of
Bilhorod-Dnistrovsk’yi, Ukraine. I don’t remember it ever being occupied,
but I am certain at another time this room would have had guests over for
birthdays or New Year’s dinners, with tables put together to make sure 20
people can get plenty of food.
My grandma kept it perfectly tidy and clean
at all times (don’t know where she found the time - she always had a million
chores she was always doing). It resembled a family museum over the years
with everything stored and displayed in various ornate ways in a glass
vitrine.
I’d see little liqueur glasses, a rhyton (or two), a collection of porcelain
figurines dressed in traditional Ukrainian attire scattered along the
displays of glass bowls, wine pitchers, and Orthodox icons. After my parents
along with me and my sister immigrated, my grandma moved some of my mum’s
objects of similar nature, expanding the collection with objects my sister
and I would make in school and various assortment of our own cups and
glasses.
Come take a small peak at some of my memories of this vitrine that
my grandma spent so many years curating.
The idea for this zine came together somewhat unexpectedly from several unlikely
sources.
After my grandma passed in spring 2022, I started working on paintings
of moments captured on camera during my visits to my grandparents in the south
of Ukraine.
As I continued to paint, I started noticing just how many photos I
took of all the tchotchkes on the various shelves around her house.
Putting all those sketches into a zine didn't occur to me until almost a year later, after I
was trying to figure out what to do with a very limited amount of washi paper I
brought back with me from Japan. Having only give-or-take 15 A3 pages, I
wanted to maximise the number of printed copies.
Folding the paper to individually show small vignettes of the numerous
objects in the vitrine seemed like a neat way to individually tell
stories of all the collected objects as part of a whole.
This zine is printed on half of an A3 paper split lengthwise and folded like an
accordion. About half of the copies use that Japanese washi paper. The
other half are printed on Chinese caligraphy paper, brought back from
China by Xinyi of
The Print House.
It's printed in blue,
flat gold
and
fluorescent orange
on SF5350 EII
riso printer. Edition of 50 copies.