Valentyna Huk, who signs her work "Sonce" ("Sun"), is a young Kharkiv artist who makes mosaics from window glass shattered by Russian missile and drone strikes. She collects the fragments at the impact sites and mounts the finished panels on facades and interiors at or beside the same locations, in a series titled "Tree of Life". Alongside the mosaics she draws in watercolour pencil, acrylic and pastel, and teaches drawing to children and adults.
Valentyna Huk is a contemporary Ukrainian artist based in Kharkiv, working under the pseudonym "Sonce" ("Sun"). She was reported as twenty-one years old in November 2024, which places her birth around 2003; she enrolled at the Kharkiv Khudprom (the city's art and industry college) but did not complete her studies, interrupted by the full-scale Russian invasion. Her primary drawing medium is a black watercolour pencil, with acrylic and pastel alongside it, and she describes the resulting sheets as "living works, with no right to a mistake". She had wanted to work in mosaic for about a year without finding an entry point until a missile struck near her building and the blast wave blew her balcony glazing inward; she recognised the debris as her material and made her first mosaic from it, a piece she still keeps at home. That became the "Tree of Life" project, whose governing rule is that every panel must be made from glass broken in a specific strike and installed at, or very close to, the place where the strike happened — two of the works use glass gathered only from the courtyards of Kharkiv's Palace of Labour. She consulted glaziers and builders to make the panels weatherproof for outdoor mounting. She calls the practice "a new ethnicity" and "a healing act towards the city": "I collect what has been shattered and return it to its place." By early 2025 four "Tree of Life" panels stood in Kharkiv, including one on the facade of the Vivat bookshop and others at the Makers gallery and café, with a fifth in Izium, close to the front line, made from shards collected on Soborna Street after the town's occupation and dedicated to the fallen commander Oleksandr Pustovit. A solo exhibition of her graphics and mosaics opened at the Halash space on Teatralnyi Avenue in Kharkiv on 1 February 2025.
Portrait: photograph sourced from lyuk.media, by Юрій Каплюченко (photo credit on the article: «Текст — Катерина Переверзева, фотографії — Юрій Каплюченко»). © the photographer / rights holder; shown for editorial purposes. Contact us for attribution or removal.
Art Movements
Works by Valentyna Huk
Tree of Life 1 (Dream)
The first street work of the "Tree of Life" series, assembled from glass broken by a Russian strike near the artist's own home and mounted on Myronosytska Street. It set the rule that each panel returns the shattered glass to the place it came from.
Tree of Life 3 (Rumble)
The companion panel to "Eye of War" at the Palace of Labour, titled after the sound of incoming fire. Both were built from the same collection of shards so that the glass would stay on the site where it was broken.
Tree of Life 5 (Beetle)
Built from glass broken at the Makers café when the building of the National Academy of Legal Sciences was hit on 23 January 2024. Unlike the outdoor panels, it hangs inside the café that supplied its material.
Tree of Life 2 (Eye of War)
One of two panels installed beside Kharkiv's Palace of Labour, made entirely from glass gathered in the building's own courtyards after a strike. The composition resolves into a single watching eye set in the branching tree form.
Tree of Life 4 (Cerberus)
Made from shards collected on Soborna Street in Izium after the town's occupation and continuing shelling, and dedicated to Oleksandr Pustovit, a Ukrainian commander killed in action. Huk made it deliberately for a town close to the front line rather than for Kharkiv.