A Visit To Olha Pryymak's Studio 08/10/2024

Olha Pryymak’s studio is hidden away on a narrow east London Street that feels like a step back in time. She came down to greet us at the door and brought us up to a beautifully light and airy space. Her work is stacked neatly along all sides of the room and the surfaces are dotted with constructions of flora and fauna. Pryymak offers us a cold green tea, brewed with pea shoots and ‘all sorts’ which is a delicious addition on a hot day.





We immediately start talking about her grounds. A couple of years ago while studying for her Painting MA, Pryymak did a one-off workshop at the RCA about materials and the importance of the paints and mediums you use. Pryymak believes strongly that she makes her best work when she really connects with the physicality of what she’s using in the studio. She loved touching and smelling the different paints and really talking about the colours. It reminded her of why she was painting in the first place.





Pryymak speaks very honestly about the loss of excitement around her practice while studying due to what was happening back home and how realigning herself with what she was painting with lured her back into it. Due to trying to overly control her process and painting methodology, she kept making ‘bad paintings’. This is of course her phrase not mine. Trying to hold onto something and control it choked up her ability to create. She happily says that she still makes these ‘bad paintings’ two years later, but she understands much more about her practice now.





The paintings we can see on the wall have deep, earthy backgrounds, and the foreground is as captivating as a human figure. I find it interesting that some works incorporate mystical, shrouded figures, whilst some navigate the space entirely without human interaction. I guess they would be considered ‘still life’ paintings but here that term feels reductive.

Part of Pryymak’s studio is shared with herbal medicine makers which is apt, given her interest in the natural world and environmentalism. She is considering changing from cotton to linen canvas since she points out that it takes nearly five times as much water to produce the same amount of cotton as linen. It is also a material that she resonates with particularly, given that Ukraine, her home country, was such a big producer of it up until the 1950s.





I ask about the cardboard box constructed at one end of her studio. There is a stage-type structure erected at the back, perched on books and old packaging. It is filled with leaves arranged into little sculptures and, most interestingly, a petalled egg-shape. In Ukraine, the painted Easter egg is an important motif. Particular patterns are painted on an egg which code for different wishes or desires. Pryymak has found her own egg-shape and covered it in fragile petals, softened to the point of becoming part of the whole. She shows us the painting she’s made of this particular egg; it’s earthy in its tone but sparked by the purples and the blues. Even without the history Pryymak tells us about the shape, the painting is almost religious in its symbolism. She narrates a fairy tale called ‘The Magical Egg’ which we both agree makes no sense, but is fascinating for that reason: through time the tale has evolved and adapted and she wanted to recreate a version of it through her set up. She sees her cardboard stage as creating a fictional narrative, with her own protagonist and a manufactured world around them.





Pryymak’s strong relationship with the materiality of Ukrainian folk art was developed in a recent series of workshops she worked on with historian Sophie Page. UCL’s ‘Field Works’ aim was to help a community of newly arrived Ukrainians and a local garden community to come together over making ritual folk objects. It was heavily focused around how materials are made, such as linen, from the weaving of flax. During the workshops, the participants followed the seasons and looked at folk ritual ways of marking significant environmental changes. It was a creative exchange, in which Pryymak could talk with people and discuss the plants and natural materials. It harks back to her inspiration coming from tactility, both of what she is painting and what she is painting with.





On one of Pryymak’s window sills sit a couple of ‘larks’. I notice them because they look almost like a basket of baked goods, but they are in fact larks, made with flour and water, and are ritually made to welcome spring. She also made motanka (guardian dolls) and didukhs (wheat sheafs that represent ancestral spirits). The paintings inspired by these creations are beautifully spiritual and reflect the weight of folkloric history and community behind them.





I ask Pryymak about how she would describe her work. She says her paintings are like giving form to the experiences of changes within the environment, or indeed, they’re a way of dealing with things. She’s interested in the unique experience of painting, since it is just one plane. Its ancient history fascinates her, and the ability to create by layering different times, cultures, references and materials all on one canvas. Its beauty comes from the conversations that occur within this, and with those seeing it. It reminds me of the fairy tale she mentioned, ‘The Magic Egg’, and how many meanings come to be layered on top of others to create something new. Pryymak’s work shows the beauty of the smallest things in nature, whilst referencing an entire world and history atop.






Text by Emily Godwin, photos by Jon Archdeacon.