This is a box that my dear late grandfather carved for my grandmother in their 20s. It is filled with marigold and Annual honesty flower seeds that my grandma sent to me from Ukraine in the first year of war. She had collected them from her little garden in Zhytomyr city so I could plant them on my balcony in Paris.
This image shows a pendant I made at 9 y.o. after a family vacation in Crimea. The stone with the hole, which is usually called “курячий бог” in Ukraine, I had found on the Black sea beach. This pendant remains my only physical memory of Ukrainian Crimea and peaceful years, before the island became occupied.
Polina Moroz was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1992. After obtaining a joint degree in art and architecture from the National Academy of Fine Arts (2013, Ukraine), she joined the architectural collective PYLORAMA focused on participatory design in urban public spaces. In 2015, she was awarded a Swedish national scholarship to pursue her Master’s degree in Spatial Experiments and Sustainable Urban Design at Lund University, in Sweden. Since 2022, she has been a member of the Paris-based art collective Diametre 15. Her work explores the human condition in times of crisis—whether personal or humanitarian—examining psychological strategies of coping, and the possibility of achieving an ethical and aesthetic form of transcendence in an increasingly secular world. She works primarily across utilitarian and sculptural object design, painting and installation. She lives and works in Paris.
This document is part of a series guest edited by Manon Lutanie.
