Kitten in Apricot Jam

There was once a little mouse who looked like her grandma. Grandma was a field mouse and the city caused her trauma.The little mouse was so scared that her grandmother would die, she decided she couldn't stay and bid the house goodbye. She went to town and met a cat.The cat was hungry and it got into a jar of jam and drowned. So the mouse went on and met a hedgehog. The hedgehog was hungry and It went into a bowl of cream and drowned. So the little mouse decided to go back home and when she returned, grandma Mouse was stone cold. Now the little mouse had nothing to fear anymore, she stayed at her house and slept sound like never before.

• As a young girl, Margarita Ivy (1998) grew up in the industrial city of Zaporizhzhya. The urban landscape was made up of industrial backdrops from the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. All too often, she was traumatised by accidents that stood on the brink of her understanding and acceptance. Thanks to such an atmosphere, she developed a perception of the world that resembled scary fables her dear grandmother used to invent for her.

• The metamorphosis of her strongest childhood memories–encounters with death, into tenderly sacred, posthumous animal stories became a necessary means of self-preservation, a process as natural to her as death had become. She carefully dips the animals into a formaldehyde bath and gradually deposits them into airy epoxy environments. It is precisely in that toxic, loving process that the more conscious "big kids,” who have already asked themselves questions about the meaning of existence, find solace.

• Wise fables have always been a guide to understanding good and evil. A euphemism for opposites that have a hundred shades of grey in liquid adulthood. They are found to varying degrees in almost all people. They have the common features of animals, although there is no mutual influence among each other. This year, good and evil have again become intensely coloured in all the nations of the world. Small and great alike look for an instructive end where the good will prevail. The lesson of the fable of life that evil destroys the world always follows by destroying itself and that in war, one dies to live can be found in humility and hope in Margarita's newest work - Táňa.

• "Please treat Táňa with tremendous respect. It's a pain we can't believe and we can't deal with. Only after I embroidered the posthumous ornament on a photo of the dead Tánička, so I could say goodbye to the unknown child, that I realised what I had created. Deciding to show it to the public is tough. It's not art. It's war. War and the terrible pain that comes with it. Pain for every Ukrainian family. Táňa and her mother died under heavy fire from Russian soldiers on the humanitarian corridor in Mariupol. " - Margarita Ivy