DARIA ZYMENKO
Resident of CUTOUT COLLAGE ART PROJECT: March 2024 - Today
She was born and lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. Since childhood, Daria loved to draw, alter old clothes, knit, and embroider.
In 2008, she enrolled in a textile design course at KNUTD (Kyiv National University of Technology and Design), where she received a master's degree in textiles in 2013. She has repeatedly participated in student competitions and won prizes.
From 2013 to 2020, she worked as a textile decorator, where she decorated the interior with textiles: curtains, bedspreads, pillows.In 2020, she started studying illustration and taking her first orders.
She has illustrated several poetry collections, a book with creative tasks for children, and made animation for a play.
Since 2021, she has been teaching the course "Illustration" for teenagers at the Ampli school.
In 2022, Daria became interested in Ukrainian embroidery and Easter eggs. She began to study ornamentation and its symbolism. She took a course on recreating an ancient Boyko embroidered shirt (vyshyvanka) at the Transcarpathian traditional embroidery studio "Kosytsia" in Uzhhorod.
In 2023, she studied at the Uzhhorod Skansen Easter egg workshop. She held master classes on creating Easter eggs on her own.
Since 2023, she has been a member of the NGO SEMA Ukraine. This is a community of women who have united to help other women who have suffered from military actions, including sexual violence. The community focuses its efforts on supporting the protection of women's rights, freedoms and public interests.
Since 2023, she has been acting in documentaries and giving interviews as a witness to Russian war crimes during the occupation.
In 2023, she became interested in collage. 2023-2024 - takes a course of collage workshops by Katya Syta "30 Workshops".
In 2024, she joined the CUTOUT COLLAGE ART PROJECT residency.
She is currently working on a series of works that will reflect her experience during the occupation. This is a personal story about the traumatic experience gained during the occupation in the Kyiv region, the path of despair, acceptance and recovery.
EXHIBITIONS
2024
- “For the Sake of the Letter”, an exhibition dedicated to the rights of Ukrainian prisoners of war, organized by the community My Ministry of Culture under the patronage of CUTOUT, Le Bonheur est Dans L'instant gallery, Paris, France.
- “Looking into Ourselves”, a collective exhibition of CUTOUT residents as part of the KAOS collage festival, Kranj, Slovenia.
- "Looking into Ourselves", a collective exhibition of CUTOUT residents, CUTOUT COLLAGE STUDIO, Kyiv, Ukraine
ARTWORKS
I study everyday life, the transience of daily moments, and look for ways to capture them.
I'm interested in the contradictions between the busy life of the city and life in nature. I believe that nature has all the answers to questions, but we get lost in the chaos of variations. I study how traumatic experiences affect people and what consequences they can have.
In my works, I look for ways to express and answer questions. Sometimes it can be a simple drawing of random people I see on the street, sometimes it is an interaction with textures, shapes, colors and volumes. I use different materials: paper, magazines, my own drawings, food packaging, paints, pencils, markers.