In the fall of 2023, when the educational process gained momentum, war paraphernalia was brought to our college. They were brought not to be viewed as historical artifacts of the ongoing war, but for a completely different purpose.
So we received a proposal to turn the cartridges into an artistic response to what we feel, what we think, what we want to say, shout or, conversely, remain silent. Most of the cartridges were disassembled by the boys and girls for work. At the end of the year, our first artistic attempts in this form were completed. The cartridges got their second life, a completely different one...
A little time passed, the last two sleeves remained untouched by the artistic brush. It was sad to look at them, and I wanted to give them a chance for a second life. Natalya Linda and Sofia Dorotska took on painting one of them, a respectable size.
Various thoughts swarmed in my head, all of them seemed interesting, meaningful, but to the point of completeness, to the point of feeling that this was exactly what was missing, especially when two different creative personalities took up the task, young, still a bit green, but with an irresistible desire to join an important cause...
We were helped to decide by an ordinary day in student life, or rather a couple of days in Ukrainian literature, where we just started studying the work of Lina Vasylivna Kostenko. Our teacher is Orysia Stepanivna Leschyshyn, an active, kind-hearted, and affectionate lady who diligently and devotedly makes efforts to ensure that something valuable and important settles in the young minds of students and becomes food for thought and creative search. At least that's what happened in our case. We managed to get acquainted with many beautiful poems by Lina Kostenko. Somehow, the poem "My First Poem Written in a Trench" resonated especially sharply, created long before the full-scale invasion, as a memory of the feelings of a child whose conscious childhood fell on the war years. This is where the implementation of the idea began.
Here are some excerpts from the creation of this art object.