That one sentence is where the textile art of Liudmyla Kulichenko begins. Desire met skill — and instead of a brush there were a needle, thread and scraps of fabric. Portraits, triptychs, quilts, whole series: all made by hand, without a single stroke of paint.
Words came first — and then fell silent for a long time. In her family they had always been there: her grandfather and her uncle were journalists and writers; her father, an engineer, wrote letters worth rereading; her son, who works in IT, now writes articles in English that are hard to put down. As a schoolgirl she wrote as well — naively, childishly. Her father took her to a literary studio, where grown men laughed at the girl, and the career ended before it had begun.
The words came back forty years later — in 2022, in emigration, when there was nowhere else to put them. Since then she has written more than fifty poems: about war and hope, about her granddaughter, about the storm, the sea and the spring.
Two degrees — economics and philology — and an MBA. And a strange symmetry of fate: the Serbo-Croatian she learned forty years ago met the Slovenian she has been trying to tame for four years now. Today this is her daily work — business consulting, supporting participants of integration courses, teaching Croatian, translation. And art.
Almost everything she makes, she gives away. Quilts to her family, portraits to her friends, the painting “Grad Rače” to the library of the town that first took her in in Slovenia, the triptych “Faces of Time” to Zavod Dress for Success Maribor. The poems for those closest to her are written to the same dates every year.
Sometimes her poems leave the page and are reborn in fabric.
And now she is teaching her granddaughter to sew — on a child’s sewing machine.
