WO·MAN
Tracing Ukrainian women’s heritage through a single inherited vyshyvanka.
WOMAN occupies a central position in Lesia Maruschak’s evolving pantheon of artist books, grounding her practice in the material legacy of a single artifact: a vyshyvanka (embroidered blouse) gifted to her in 1979 by her great-aunt Hanya during a precarious visit to Soviet Ukraine. Passed directly from a wedding chest into Maruschak’s hands, the blouse holds an intimate and unbroken provenance. Its stitches, wear, and lingering scent embody generations of women who endured surveillance, migration, and cultural erasure. After decades protected in darkness, the garment—when unfolded again—activated a lineage long held in silence.
This heirloom forms the conceptual core of WO·MAN. Through close photographic examinations of seams, frayed edges, and interior structures, Maruschak treats the blouse as a manuscript: evidence, testimony, and cultural repository. The project extends a material inquiry that began with her first book (2017), crafted from handmade hemp paper in homage to early Ukrainian women’s labour. That inaugural work established the foundations of her aesthetic—a devotion to rare materials, artisanal processes, and the preservation of cultural memory through book form.
Collectors’ familiar with her works—TRANSFIGURATION and THIS LAND—will recognize the continuity. Textiles function throughout her oeuvre as democratic architecture, binding personal histories to collective experience. The trajectory culminates in TRANSLATION 19,546 (2026), an edition that synthesizes her decades-long engagement with fibre, archive, and the lives of Ukraine’s missing children in a form designed for institutional stewardship. For collectors, it offers an object of exceptional provenance and cultural significance—an artifact of Ukrainian survival rendered with the precision and depth of contemporary fine press bookmaking.
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