SACRED STRAW • САКРАЛЬНА СОЛОМА

April 2023 – February 2024

Myroslava Boikiv

Myroslava Boikiv was born in Prykarpattia in the village of Kovalivka, Kolomyia district, Ivano-Frankivsk region. 

In 1993, she graduated from the Kolomyia Children's Art School with honours. 

From 1993 to 1998 she studied at the Kosiv Specialist College of Applied and Decorative Arts.

From 1998 to 2002 she was a student of the Art Faculty of the Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian University, where she studied at the Department of Decorative and Applied Arts. She successfully defended her master's thesis with honours on the topic: "Carpetmaking of Hutsul region of the late XIX and early XX centuries" and received a master's degree with honors. 

From 2002 to 2004 she worked as an artist-restorer of fabric in the Kolomyia Museum of Folk Art of Hutsulshchyna and Pokuttya named after Josafat Kobrynsky.

From 2005 to 2015 Myroslava headed the world-famous national museum "Pysanka" in the city of Kolomyia.

Participant of many conferences, seminars, symposia, round tables held on various topics about the creators, art and restoration of works of art. 

Ms. Boikiv authored articles about folk art and its creators, organized more than 150 various exhibitions of fine and decorative arts, was organizer and leader of hundreds of thematic master classes on folk themes.

Along with research work, Myroslava Boikiv has been a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine since 2013. 

 She is a regular participant in various collective exhibitions and continues to tirelessly demonstrate her new creations on personal ones, which have already taken place more than 20 in Ukraine and abroad.

In 2016, Myroslava presented her works in Canada for the first time.  Since then, it has actively promoted Ukrainian culture in the Canadian environment. She conducts fascinating lectures and master classes on women's traditional wear, jewelry, embroidery, weaving, straw art and more. Myroslava generously conveys this knowledge and love for Ukrainian culture to the Canadian audience.

PARANIA SOZANSKI

Parania was born to Antin and Anastasia Jacyla on October 30, 1928 in Vysochany, Lemkivshchyna, Ukraine.

Parania is a third-generation pysanka artist. As a child, she watched and learned the art from her dad and her aunt. In 1947, under the Polish government’s brutal “Operation Wisla,” her family’s land was confiscated, and they, with tens of thousands of Ukrainians, were deported to northwest Poland, where they were persecuted. No one dared to show any Ukrainianess or write pysanky during these times.

In 1959, Parania immigrated to Canada, married and settled on a piece of land in Pickering, Ontario, where she raised three children. Life was difficult. Rurally and culturally isolated with no chance to learn English, no home phone to speak with family in Toronto and money in short supply, Parania became a cleaning lady and took great pride in doing a great job. She grew, canned and froze all her own vegetables and fruit to get through the winter.

As her children grew, she returned to writing pysanky. She was amazed how the art form, its colours and designs, had grown and expanded in the diaspora and felt she was in pysanka paradise.

With the years, her gardens expanded. Her love of flowers is evident in her pysanky and solomianky designs. Even in her 80s, she gardened from daybreak to past sunset. She got her inspiration, energy, sheer joy and physical strength from her gardens, and she was enthusiastically searching for new ideas for her art in nature around her.

In her 50s, when winter would approach and the gardens were resting, Parania turned to writing pysanky full-time. And when her worn, tired hands began to shake, making writing straight lines with uncorrectable wax impossible, she created a new art form- solomianky. Someone had gifted her an emu egg. She decided that the natural colour of straw would compliment the dark green of the natural emu egg and came up with a process to glue different straw shapes and thicknesses onto an emu egg.

She practiced sketching floral designs on her eggs, trying to perfect them. Her best ideas for new designs came to her at night. She would often lay awake for hours trying to perfect a design in her head and then draw it at night.

Parania felt great accomplishment, satisfaction and overwhelming joy whenever she finished an egg.

When she was quite frail, she still had a goal and, at times, with the help of Myroslava Boikiv, mustered up bits of energy to finish two more solomianky on Ostrich eggs for her children, to leave a legacy to them, her Ukraine and especially her region Lemkivshcyna.

Ancillary Programming For Sacred Straw – 2023