Bowl of Shadows
Myska #2 Guculia.Tini by Danuta Kril (image: Fabian Frinzel).
Combining a 19th-century process of smoking ceramics developed in Havarechyna, a village in western Ukraine, with a contemporary approach to shape and form, Danuta Kril has created a series of objects that speak to the region’s past and present.
Havarechyna was famous for its black-smoked ceramics a hundred years ago, but the craft declined during the Soviet period. “For many, Havaretsk ceramics were unknown,” explains Kril, a Lviv-based designer who hopes to revive the technique, which involves burning logs at high temperatures to achieve a unique, glazeless, metallic effect. “I realised that the process needs to be rescued and reinterpreted in a new context,” she says. “It gives an opportunity to work with a minimalist shape within an original process of smoking that produces splendid black and smooth finishing.”
Kril’s Myska #2 Guculia.Tini bowl is part of a wider ceramic series made with the potter Mykola Bida. It merges Havarechyna’s traditional technology with modernist references, manifesting a new way of looking at Ukrainian cultural heritage. These ceramics show how contemporary expression can revive older craft techniques, demonstrating the ongoing relevance of traditional technologies.
The designer points to the cultural richness of Hutsulshchyna, a region in Ukraine’s picturesque Carpathian Mountains, as her main inspiration for the series. The word “tini” is Ukrainian for “shadows”, a reference to the famous film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Sergey Parajanov. Released in 1965, Parajanov’s film became an iconic representation of Ukrainian culture that displayed the spirit of Hutsulshchyna and the profound symbolism embedded in its traditions. Kril’s work uses local solar and mountain archetypal forms – made famous by the film – to invoke a fundamental rootedness in nature and heritage. She emphasises this through the shape and material of the bowl, highlighting a connection with what she perceives as ancestral modes of simple, everyday living.
The production of Kril’s ceramics has been threatened by Russia’s war against Ukraine. The clay she uses originates in Slovyansk, a city in the east of Ukraine that has found itself at the epicentre of military action since the beginning of the invasion. Kril managed to rescue a tonne of clay before hostilities began, and the ceramics have become a symbol of creation in opposition to the destruction caused by the war. Myska #2 Guculia.Tini serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of preserving and celebrating cultural heritage, even amid crisis. This message of hope and resilience is particularly powerful in the context of the war in Ukraine. It speaks to the ability of art and design to inspire and uplift even in the darkest of times.
Words Svitlana Biedarieva
Photographs Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #35. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.