Scattered Light

An Exhibition by Ukrainian Refugee Artists Navigating Memory, War, and the Search for Safety

Folk of Gloucester is proud to present Scattered Light, a powerful and deeply personal group exhibition showcasing the works of Ukrainian refugee artists. In the shadow of a war now entering its third year, these artists explore how displacement, memory, and resilience shape their new realities. Through diverse visual languages and mediums, each artist offers a unique reflection on the fragility of safety, the meaning of home, and the emotional terrain of living through collapse.

Curated by Olha Barvynka, Scattered Light brings together a constellation of perspectives that radiate through personal histories and shared grief.

“Thinking about the Ukrainian context is inevitable in every Ukrainian artist’s practice. Whether it’s immediately visible—as in Ganushchak’s photographs—or more subtle, like in the quiet presence of a water lily, the artworks together form a silent conversation; they speak with visual language to what we often find too painful to express through verbal language.”

— Olha Barvynka, curator of Scattered Light

Scattered Light does not centre on a single narrative but rather radiates through a constellation of perspectives—each a response to the question:

 What is a safe place? Where is the safe place?

Scattered Light is a collective meditation on the enduring human capacity to find light amid ruin. It is about war, yes—but also about art as sanctuary, memory as resistance, and the ongoing search for places—real or imagined—where safety might still exist.

Meet the artists:

Yuliia

 Holovatiuk-Ungureanu

1987

As a Ukrainian refugee and student at the University of Staffordshire, my art reflects a personal journey of war, loss, and resilience. I use photography, found objects, and immersive installations to explore memory, displacement, and cultural survival. Remnants of destroyed homes—barbed wire, charred paper, burnt wood—become acts of remembrance. My sculptural ceramic bricks, resembling toys, symbolise rebuilding—layering trauma, identity, and hope to envision Ukraine’s future. Art has become my voice, my resistance, and my way of preserving heritage. I create space for reflection and remembrance.

Where suffering speaks, silence is not an option

Instagram: @yuliia_art_uk_ua

Email: ngureanuyuliia@gmail.com

Studio address: АСAVA, Stoke-on-Trent

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Olha Barvynka

1987

I am studying fine art at the University of Gloucester and working across painting and sculpture. Materials like cardboard, metal, glass, concrete, and textile appear across sculpture and painting. My practice explores the fragile boundary between system and chaos, order and collapse. I confront war, machinery, and our dependence on systems we believe we control—until we don’t.

 Mobility is crucial to my sculptural language: works are modular, built to mutate, pack, and move. This logic extends into my painting, where surfaces are fragmented and reassembled. I’m drawn to thresholds—where regimes fail, ruins rise, and something unpredictable begins to emerge. This moment of breakdown is where my work finds its voice.
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Website:    www.olhabarvynka.art 

Instagram:   @olha.barvynka 

Email: Olhabarvynka@gmail.com 

Studio address:  Cheltenham

  • Ruins

  • Falling

  • Clash

  • Fragmentation

  • Conception

  • Urbanscape

Oksana Petrova

1969

My work is rooted in the deep spiritual and cultural memory of Ukraine. I use traditional garments, embroidery, and sacred symbols not only as visual elements but as carriers of identity, resilience, and collective spirit. The figures I paint are often faceless or spectral—echoes of ancestors, protectors, or even the land itself. I see them as both presence and absence: those who are no longer with us, and those who live through us.

Red beads, crosses of thorns, wheat, and vines—these are not just motifs, but prayers. My paintings are a way to process grief and resistance, but also to express hope. I want my art to hold space for remembrance and strength, for the soul of a people that cannot be broken. In each thread, each gesture, I try to paint not only what is seen, but what is deeply felt.



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Instagram:    @kseniiapetrova8866

Email: oksanapetrova426@gmail.com

Studio address:  Swindon

  • They crucified me without me

  • He who comes with the sword will perish by sword

  • Tea time

  • The flame of hope has not yet gone out

Oksana Fursovich

1983

My work is a celebration of imagination as refuge. I paint vibrant, dreamlike worlds where the innocence of childhood is never lost—where fantastical mushrooms bloom like memories, bunnies leap through fields of color, and flowers radiate an inner light of their own. In these visions, I try to recapture a sense of joy that feels both familiar and far away—something we all carry inside us, even in the face of darkness.

Through bold color, playful forms, and intuitive abstraction, I create a space that resists despair and instead embraces wonder. Each brushstroke is an act of healing; each composition, a gentle rebellion against the heaviness of conflict. I don’t paint what is—I paint what could be, and what should be. These are not just fantasy flowers—they are symbols of resilience, fragments of light scattered through shadow, whispering hope.

This is how I cope, how I resist, how I dream—through color, through play, through the enduring magic of beauty.

Instagram: @oksana.kraski

Email: fursovich83@gmail.com

Studio address:  Cheltenham

  • 55cm x 45cm Acrylic on wet canvas.

    Poppy

  • Dandelions from poppies

  • Sunflower

  • Pearl rabbit

  • Mushrooms fantasy

Natalia Fedchenko

1978

Sometimes it feels as though I am continuing a conversation that began long before me—somewhere between the words of Walter Benjamin and the silence of Klee’s Angelus Novus. An angel who cannot turn his gaze from the past, though the wind—what we call progress—pushes him forward. It is in this paradox that I find my fulcrum.

My work unfolds across painting, drawing, photography, video, and performance. These are not separate disciplines to me, but different modes of attention. I do not depict—I listen. Creation is not resolution—it is tension, silence, doubt, a trace among the fragments. The process is slow. Listening takes time. But within that stillness, something begins to speak.

I return often to the question: where is the movement? Progress is not always forward. It spirals, stutters, stops.. Photography and video let me hold a moment in suspension. Performance lets me embody the questions. Through each form, I seek a way to move through time without forgetting where I came from..

Instagram:    @romanenko6902

Email:  fedchenko_natalia@ukr.net

Studio address:  Newent

Ruslan Ganushch

1970-2025

As a filmmaker, journalist, and photographer, my work is grounded in bearing witness. Since 2014, I’ve documented the defining moments of Ukraine’s struggle—from Maidan to the frontlines of Donbas, to the destruction in Bucha, Irpin, and beyond. My still lifes in Scattered Light offer quiet reflections born from violence: fragments of beauty found in dust, ruins, and the way light falls across forgotten objects. These images are not just art—they are memory, resistance, and truth in a time when truth itself is under attack.

I have seen how war reshapes people. Those who’ve looked into the face of death become deeply free—unbound by fear or illusion. They are builders of a future forged in clarity and courage. My practice is both personal and collective, shaped by those I’ve stood beside and lost, and by those who continue to fight. Through photography, I try to honor their strength—and keep the story alive.

Website:    www.rusivlan.art

Email: Verastadon2@gmail.com

Roman Bonchuk

1980

My painting practice blends surrealism with speculative history. I reimagine political realities through layered symbols and visual paradoxes, often exploring historical alternatives—what could have been or what might still become. Through fractured yet vivid interpretations of the past and future, I aim to challenge linear narratives and invite new ways of seeing.

In my world, myth and machine merge. Cyborgs, ancient heroes, and reconstructed icons inhabit surreal architectures of identity and time. I’m drawn to the instability of truth in moments of upheaval, and to the ways conflict reshapes our understanding of who we are—and who we’ve been.

Within the Scattered Light exhibition, my paintings reflect the surreal fragmentation of identity under war. I try to capture a kaleidoscope of heroism, resistance, and introspection amid collapse. For me, history is not just a lesson, but a space for imaginative reconstruction.

Website:    www.rusivlan.art

Email: Artist_Bonchuk_agency@yahoo.com

Instagram:    @rombonck

Andriy Andriiaschenko

1954

I seek to capture moments where the spiritual and the physical meet quietly in light. My portraits, painted with icon-like stillness, hold a ghostly glow—each figure a vessel of emotion, presence, and silent belief. They are not just people, but symbols of something deeper: hope, memory, and resilience. Horses emerge like visions—fluid, luminous, and free—embodying strength and transcendence. Bathed in shifting light, they seem to move between worlds, much like the souls I portray. This body of work reflects my fascination with the unseen forces that shape us—the shimmer of spirit behind the eyes, the grace in motion, the faith we carry without words. It is an invitation to pause in the in-between, where scattered light reveals more than darkness ever could.

Email: 1954@gmail.com

Valentyna Ksendz

1972

In moments of deep uncertainty, I return to water. It reflects, it heals, it holds memory. My painting practice is a search for stillness in a world that has shifted beneath my feet.

Since leaving Ukraine, I’ve found myself drawn to light, to colour. .I am captivated by the symbolism held in every stalk of wheat, the resilience of wild sunflowers, and the secrets tucked into fields and hedgerows. These encounters with nature charge me with energy and give shape to my work.

This body of work is not a direct response to war, but it is shaped by exile. In painting these imagined landscapes, I try to offer a space for calm—a place where grief and beauty can coexist.

I began painting after overcoming a long and difficult chapter in my life, and each canvas since has grown from that turning point. For me, nature—like art is a form of survival.

Instagram: @valentynaart_uk

Email:  ksendzvala@gmail.com

Studio address:  Malmesbury