Tanya Chakálova is a Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist based in Ireland, working across painting, printmaking, textile-based work, and video. Her practice explores memory, trauma, and identity through material processes rooted in reconstruction, repetition, and preservation.

In 2022, Tanya survived the siege and destruction of her native Mariupol during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. This experience continues to shape her work, which reflects on how war trauma settles within memory, body, and everyday life.

Rather than attempting to depict war directly, the work becomes a way of living alongside its aftermath and of reclaiming the ability to document and witness. A central tension within the practice lies between preserving the collective memory of war and learning how to live with its emotional weight.

Fabric and embroidery have become central materials within the body of work. Associated with care, protection, domestic space, and intergenerational connection, they stand in contrast to imagery of war and destruction. Photographic prints function as fragments of memory and reconstructions of moments that could not be documented at the time, yet continue to demand preservation. Anthotype prints mirror the nature of trauma memory itself – unstable, fragile, and vulnerable to fading and disappearance. As a slow, repetitive gesture, embroidery serves both as testimony and as a grounding practice: tracing experiences that resist erasure while becoming a way of returning to the body during repeated engagement with traumatic memory and imagery.

Through these processes, Tanya also reflects on how war is remembered, mediated, and spoken about, while preserving the lived experiences of civilians often reduced to maps, statistics, and military or political reports.