Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Mary Lydon
Mary Lydon is a multidisciplinary artist from Ukraine, based in Scotland. The co-founder of Skarbnystya, her current work addresses the erosion of Ukrainian culture by russia. Her projects traverse themes of life, death and rebirth, reflecting the circumstances of her homeland and addressing the trauma of forced displacement. Continually working with the immense visual power of symbols and traditional motifs, Lydon incorporates flags, coats of arms and other emblematic material into her constructions, from neo-tribal manhole covers and modernised coats of arms to embroidered clothes and hand woven tapestries. The destruction of the war on Ukrainian culture is mirrored in both technique and intent-eroding family photos with bleach to illustrate the impact of radiation on daily life, to a perpetual commitment to utilising public and abandoned spaces in Ukrainian cities for her work to advocate for the safeguarding of Ukrainian visual heritage. Her practice hinges itself on experimentation: refusing to repeat herself, she has metamorphosed across mediums, retaining the same interest in symbol and ornament whether painting, stitching or engraving. Her work is patient and considered, often large spectacles that are elaborate down to the smallest mark. For the observer, this invites a sublime experience, a reckoning with the self brought about by infinite divisibility at such scale. Every solitary stroke accumulates into an emphatic, grand and imposing corpus of iconography. Her origins in wall-painting and graffiti stem from an inveterate impulse to transform and reclaim abandoned sites and objects through large-scale paintings, and the consequential documenting and spotlighting of onsite artefacts. This impulse has led Lydon into her practice today curating Skarbnystya exhibitions annually; the showcasing and preservation of curios and ephemera made around and in light of this crucial moment in Ukrainian identity.
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‘Skarbnytsya Posters Archive’
Gouache on paper, acrylic on wooden box
Over the past three years, a group of GSA’s recent students and graduates have been curating and art-directing the Skarbnytsya exhibition. This project was a response to the tragedy that has befallen Ukraine and its people. Skarbnytsya is the Ukrainian word for a treasure box, the place in which a country keeps its treasures. We chose this word because it symbolises the beauty of objects with a childish appreciation and curiosity. Skarbnytsya team aimed to create a platform to host the work of Ukrainian artists who had lost their spaces to exhibit because of the war. This became an opportunity to form a network, allowing artists to continue showcasing their work during this difficult time. This network also became a form of protest against the disruption of their livelihoods.
The core values of Skarbnytsya are to raise public awareness of young, independent creatives and artists affected by russia’s invasion and to connect them with other creatives in Scotland and across the UK. A portion of the proceeds from art sales is always donated to various humanitarian charities supporting Ukraine. To date, Skarbnytsya has raised £11,882.61, directly supporting Ukrainian artists and promoting international cultural exchange. Our first sale introduced nine Ukrainian artists from Kyiv, Odesa, and Kharkiv, featuring works across a variety of mediums.These works opened up a fluid dialogue with the audience, sharing the layered political and personal contexts behind them.
Building on this foundation, our second exhibition expanded in scale and scope, presenting works by 15 Ukrainian artists, 10 Scottish artists, and 5 international contributors. The curation followed a geographic narrative from Ukraine through Poland and Italy, culminating in Glasgow – creating a literal and symbolic mirror between the cultures. This strategic inclusion of Glasgow-based artists helped ground the Ukrainian works in a local context, enhancing resonance and fostering community investment. With support growing from cities like Manchester and London, including a donation of the Mckina Portrait Series by Raw Tape, our reach and network continued to expand.
Our third and most ambitious show explored the themes of journey, passage, and voyage. Drawing on the Celtic labyrinth as a symbol of transition, the exhibition invited visitors into a playful, inquisitive, and immersive environment. It focused on contemporary craft and folk practices, showcasing the journey embedded in each tapestry, weaving, sculpture, and painting. With 42 artists participating – 26 from Ukraine and 16 based in Glasgow – this edition highlighted both parallel and intersecting mythologies, making invisible cultural webs visible. The opening weekend welcomed students, families, Ukrainian visitors, local galleries, and new audiences, affirming the need for these cross-cultural conversations.
A key element throughout Skarbnytsya’s journey has been the design of its exhibition posters, which serve not just as promotional material but as the first chapter in the story of each show. The posters are carefully crafted to set the visual language, as well as the emotional and thematic tone of the upcoming exhibition. The first poster featured an image of a castle, referencing the venue – The House Art Collective – and evoking a sense of place and sanctuary. The second incorporated imagery of Glasgow’s iconic “three-spike” and spinning-top fences, reflecting the city as Skarbnytsya’s home and using the symbol of a fence as a metaphor for Ukrainian sovereignty and the idea of guarded borders. For the third edition, the poster featured a Celtic maze entwined with stone-like branches, evoking the feeling of wandering through a dark forest or labyrinth—where artworks are the hidden treasures waiting to be discovered. This folkloric, storybook tone helped shape the viewer’s experience before even stepping into the space.
The success of each exhibition reaffirms our mission: to create space, opportunity, and financial support for artists whose platforms have been disrupted by war, and to foster shared understanding through creativity.
Words: Ewelinka Dochan, Mary Lydon
‘The Sun is low’
In loving memory of Yana Pavlova
Tapestry; wool, cashmere, cotton, 108 x 160 cm
This final work is the natural apogee in Mary Lydon’s years-long experimental devotion to symbol and traditional motif. With a corpus of work metamorphosing across mediums through spray-painting, engraving and stitching, the handwoven tapestry is a return to her ancestral craft, reflecting a shift from the public and monumental to the intimate and ritualised. Lydon takes as the root the Ukrainian folk song “The Sun is Low,” a girl’s lament for her lost love, who in her grief lays down on the ground and falls asleep forever, her heart buried in the earth. The slumber is ambiguous and multiple in its metaphor in the song, and so too in Lydon’s work.
A vertical triptych, each stratum of the tapestry reflects the planes of existence: death, life, rebirth. The lowest holds the heart—the memory, love, and grief fertilising the living sediment. At the very centre, the body of the girl is suspended, her mortality vulnerable below the expanse above, wherein the tree distorts and disintegrates into its own landscape. The schema is deliberately interrupted and unstable, the motifs breaking rank and bleeding across strata, the muddied palette contributing to its ambiguity and command for closer attention but also suggestive of a certain holism.
Ambiguous still is the role of the drones that crowd the upper boundary of the tapestry, clustering ever present, their notably intelligible form stark over the rich metaphor of the scene below. It’s unclear the extent to which they are involved with the story—whether they have somehow caused this heartbreak, the rupture at the heart of things, or if they are passive in this story, yet still a permanent vice on the throat at the edges of every moment. The meaning need not be pinned in. Even throughout the construction of the piece, Lydon’s shifting intentions and emotional register were woven into the fabric. Upon its completion this tapestry has been dedicated to Yana Pavlova, who passed during the work’s creation, and whose memory has been forever embedded into the girl’s image.
The work connects to wider themes within Mary’s practice: the overlap of personal experience with collective cultural trauma, and the adaptation of folk heritage into new, urban contexts. The act of weaving is a rite, and one which is handed down matrilineally. Lydon takes on the torch of a rich crafting tradition in her own culture as a Ukrainian girl, casting a contemporary understanding of her heritage with an eye to the fraught political climate and unceasing determination to preserve that which is threatened. The heart is depicted in its true likeness, a signal to Lydon’s upbringing, exposed to the images and scans of real human hearts by her mother, a cardiologist. Unlike the fracture above, here grief becomes integrated, woven into camouflage, the pattern otherwise unbroken. The figurative is not foregrounded but rather absorbed, as the narrative is flattened into the logic of the textile. Memory is less transmitted through the directness of the image than through its gesture, repetition and labour.
The sound accompaniment by opherings and DREICH for the work echoes this. The durational work is made on a LYRA-8, a unique analogue synthesiser which uses principles that lie in the base of living organisms. The “voices” of the 8 generations are constructed in such a way that allows for non-linearity. As such the visual language of the body returning to earth in Lydon’s weaving, where rebirth is not clean but entropic and osmosing, is cocooned in this piece, which begins slow and crooning, and falls into a slumbering cacophonous layering of voices, once again giving way to a sharp post-traumatic ringing like a tightrope, at which point a distant and tender chorus of “The Sun is Low” pushes up against the sharpness and folds in the war siren, the death-knell turning in on itself. The latter half of the piece slips between a crunching, animalistic/machinistic crying and whirring, the trilling of the siren, a guttural wailing from the throat, and the chorus fading in and out again like a wave, inevitable and eternal.
Words: Georgia Bloom
Sound: opherings, DREICH
Weaving help: Christian Swift, Varvara Yurenko
Install help: Saul Crumlish, Khrystyna Aristova, Chris Roberts
