Fallout

By Sasha Shevchenko

Produced over a year at the Harbourfront Centre Textile Residency, Fallout acts as a reinvestigation into the fluid techniques and methods that are passed along through craft.

Inspired by traditional Ukrainian embroidery, Shevchenko teases pre-existing designs and symbols to the edge of abstraction, where meaning frays, then falls apart. Ukrainian Textile crafts have immense symbolism and rhythm embedded into them, and yet, shifting diasporic contexts have a way of curiously re-interpreting pre-existing tradition. What was once a permanent style or skill is now fluid, evolving into new forms that respond to individual perspectives.

Inspired by Ukrainian folklore, architecture, and stitch symbology, Shevchenko aims to innovate a new kind of embroidery technique where an image no longer appears static. The familiar becomes a blur, aspires to crawl out of existing boundaries, or settles itself amongst inky black silhouettes of beasts and foliage. What once seemed clearly definable now takes on a life of its own as outgrowth, material compound, landscape, or body. Shevchenko’s tensioned works think about the way motifs respond to the diasporic journey, testing if they can turn obsolete or stand as testaments to time.

If we push a cultural motif beyond its designation, we start to postulate on its role in an increasingly shifting world. The mind begins to look for patterns, and uses glimmers of familiarity to construct new interpretations. Suddenly, tradition becomes a mysterious instigator behind stories thought to be impossible, and begins to build a framework for future possibilities.