these hands. these hands were never made for writing. harvesting. digging. plowing. grasping mounds of calluses. these hands. these hard-won hands. grasping, disquiet hands are my ancestral gifts. family heirlooms passed down from other butter hands. hands which flipped blini made of lace. the hands which skinned potatoes for every dish of every meal. the hands which dug fields. the hands which didn’t catch the stranger’s newborn minutes after the revolution. the hands of embroidery and knitting. sculpting objects of prolonged yarn; only fit for a trail of one’s return. the hands which grazed other women and god’s saints. the hands which picked cucumbers from fields, lifted glasses of vodka to one’s lips. hands piloting helicopters. the hands which overdressed me into woolen layers in the spring. the hands passed down to me worked in murmansk, the former leningrad, and what is now moldova. the hands which photographed a bear in the wild, resembling not a bear, but a stain, a smudge. the hands which firmly clutched a book. held on to the subway railing, refusing to sit down. these hands were never meant for writing. these hands are relative.
Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Olga works within the mediums of photography, text, and installation. Her focus is on memory, home, (dis)place, language, inheritance/loss and the disruptive. She currently resides in Olympia, WA, where she co-founded and co- curates Desuetude gallery.
Photo by Olga Mikolaivna
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