Ukraine in the Heart of Scotland

Mariya Dykalo

Born in Lviv, Ukraine, Mariya Dykalo studied Fine Art and Fashion, specialising in leather accessories design. Following the completion of her Master’s degree, she relocated to London, where her design career developed alongside her fine art practice. In 2013, she was appointed Creative Director of Aspinal of London. Her work for the brand expanded across fashion, interiors, and licensed design projects, characterised by a synthesis of structure and hand-drawn organic motifs. These cross-cultural perceptions underpin Dykalo’s multi-media driven practice, moving between abstraction and stylisation to explore the dialogue between natural systems, human-made order and spirituality.

Dykalo’s multidisciplinary practice spanning floral design, painting, and textile works, is a vibrant expression of her Ukrainian cultural identity, drawing deeply on the rich traditions of Ukrainian folk art, particularly Petrykivka painting. Characterised by vivid floral compositions imbued with symbolic meanings of prosperity and harmony, the two-dimensional Petrykivka style flourished across the decorative arts of nineteenth-century Ukraine, from porcelain ornamentation to intricate embroidery. Rather than describing the visible world, Dykalo constructs immersive visual fields in which organic forms and gestural marks interlace and drift across canvas and textile. Through stylised and emblematic imagery, her work communicates the animism of nature, echoing Petrykivka’s ethos of humanity’s unity with the natural world and the cyclical rhythms of time.

Working between her plein-air garden studio and her design workshop in West Sussex, Dykalo develops her paintings and designs from an emotional and in-situ connection with nature. Her paintings unfold through layered, gestural mark-making and vivid chromatic fields that evoke the vibrational energy of the natural world. These floral and painterly motifs are mutable forms which inspire many of Dykalo’s intricately hand-painted designs for wearable art, harnessing the historic and protective symbolism of Petrykivka painting. Dykalo’s work has also engaged with themes of the transformation of war-torn landscapes and human resilience, informed by her national heritage. Her sunflower paintings, in particular, revisit the floral motif as both an emblem of beauty and a symbol of endurance, situating personal reflection within a broader cultural and emotional context of present-day Ukraine.

Alongside her studio practice, Dykalo has actively supported environmental and humanitarian causes. She has created and donated works to organisations including the The Royal Society of Arts (Insulate Ukraine Charity Auction) Blue Marine Foundation and the South Downs National Park Trust, and has collaborated with the Olena Pinchuk Foundation and St Mary’s Ukrainian School in London to establish shared studio spaces for young Ukrainians, fostering creative exploration and future-oriented world-building.

The Spirit of Cowdray Polo, 2024
Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 150 cm

Inspired by her view of polo players moving across the golden fields of the Cowdray Estate, Mariya Dykalo reflects on the meeting point between British and Ukrainian cultural identity. As a Ukrainian artist living in Britain, she sees the landscape of Cowdray as a space of quiet union between heritage and belonging. The Cowdray Park Polo Club has played a key role in cultivating support for Ukraine through its yearly initiative of planting sunflowers - the national flower of Ukraine - as well as providing crucial aid in supporting Ukrainians who have fled the conflict in search of a home in partnership with the Chichester District Council’s ‘Homes for Ukraine Scheme’.

Painted in 2024, the work also marks three years since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, carrying with it a sense of reflection and continuity. The recurring sunflower emerges as a subtle thread throughout Dykalo’s broader practice, symbolising resilience and remembrance. The joyous and uplifting colour palette expresses her appreciation for the quintessentially British countryside, which has been her home since the early 2000s, and which continues to shape her visual language.

Poppies in Bloom, Part 2, 2024
Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 80 cm

In Poppies in Bloom, fiery red gestural brushstrokes unfold from Dykalo’s engagement with floral symbolism and her intuitive, in-situ response to the natural world as a plein-air painter. The richly textured surface presents the poppy as a charged and ambivalent motif: its vivid chromatic intensity carrying layered associations of fragility and remembrance.

Long entwined with collective memory since the First World War, the poppy appears here as both cultural signifier and living form. The poppy is held in tension between beauty and loss, informed by the artist’s personal reflections on war-torn landscapes.

The work invites viewers to immerse themselves in its saturated reds and to encounter the emotional density embedded within each expressive mark.