Original artwork description:

"Fireweed" is about the intrusion of the living into spaces of ruin. At its core is the image of the plant that rapidly colonized London’s bombsites during the Second World War: rosebay willowherb, commonly called fireweed. It appeared on waste ground, collapses, and burn scars, favoring soil that had passed through flame; by 1944 it was recorded on the vast majority of bombsites, and naturalists called it a pioneer of blasted terrain.

Transposing this image to today’s Ukraine, the work does not claim botanical accuracy: in our cities, fireweed does not form alleys across the rubble. Yet that very absence becomes part of the gesture. I “transplant” the symbol — like a metaphorical seedling of hope — into our conditions. In this way, fireweed shifts from London’s local memory to a universal language of survival: wherever the trace of an explosion remains, the order of succession — the slow return of life and meaning — begins.

In Fireweed, hope is neither optimism nor consolation, but a capacity to push through the mesh of trauma. Between charred lines, cracks, and voids, the flower’s vertical axis emerges as a temporary brace. This is a work about memory that does not close the wound but keeps a vector — ash to sprout, silence to voice — and, in doing so, makes our “after” imaginable.

Materials used:

oil, concrete

Tags:

#nature #rocks #london #grey #flower #plants #leaves #silver #war #hope #concrete #fireweed #silhoette #ruined #ukranian