Ayla Dmyterko is a Ukrainian-Canadian artist based in Glasgow, Scotland whose interdisciplinary practice explores cultural memory, diasporic imagination and overlapping histories of possession and dispossession. Grounded in lineages of painting, her field expands to involve moving image, installation, dance, material cultures and texts.
Drawing upon lived experience, as well as the parallel psycho-geographies of colonialism across ancestral and adopted landscapes, Dmyterko considers how histories are inherited, fragmented, and reactivated across generations. Her works engage archival silence and vernacular forms of knowledge, bringing together folkloric, spiritual, tacit, and pre-patriarchal registers to challenge chronological and canonical interpretations of art history. Her use of repetition, and ritual considers how embodied practices can carry knowledge across geographic and generational distance, while also acknowledging the slippages and loss that occurs amidst assimilation.
Environmental anxiety and the relationship between culture and nature are also central to her practice. Through what she describes as solastalgic and animist approaches, Dmyterko considers ecological crisis alongside histories of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism; her artworks become forms of remedial repair practiced through ritual, with slower temporalities and process-based intentions. Across these concerns, Dmyterko is interested in the recurring ways images, objects, and artistic practices become mediums through which belief is collectively produced. Her work is syncretic, spiralling, and hyphenated, moving between inherited histories and contemporary conditions to embrace transformation, regeneration, and dignity.
Following off-modernist U-turns and detours, her current approach extends from inquiry into the Ukrainian-Avant Garde, or 'Executed Renaissance'. Interested in colour as affect and process over perfection in response to current technological threats to artistic integrity, her works draw upon ecclesiastical motifs, compositional strategies and modes of artistic concealment inherent to images as devices of both rupture and rapture.
I would like to acknowledge the sustained support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Creative Scotland & The Shevchenko Foundation.
My artwork is represented by Alma Pearl, London, UK
Portrait taken by artist Jess Holdengarde in my studio at David Dale Gallery
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