Faculty of Art

Printmaking & Publications

Nadiya Svirsky

Like a Phantom Limb

Preserving something. An empty space, filled with past life.

““The second of the two tightly representational works of the thesis series, this small and intimate acrylic painting depicts a bedroom in the house of my late great-grandmother in rural Ukraine. I took this image of her house several years after she had passed, but the interior of the house had barely changed. Old clothes still lay everywhere, stacks of newspapers on the kitchen table, blankets still crumpled. Things had not been moved, as if in attempt to preserve something that not present but also not absent. In depicting this image as representationally as possible, I am trying to freeze the process of decay, both in the physical and mental existence of this site. As a place that I feel slipping away from me each passing year, I dwell on the places I knew, places I leave behind. Now it is both frozen in time - standing unoccupied and undisturbed by humans, but vulnerable to physical erosion, and to being forgotten.””