This mini-show presents eight artworks by four women icon-makers from West Ukraine created in time of war. They bear witness to the very different ways Ukrainian artists are dealing with the horrors of the conflict without losing hope for the future.

In a modern spin on the biblical theme of turning swords into plowshares, Natalya Rusetska has turned a plank from a dismantled ammunition box into contrasting visions of the good earth created by God and a cosmic nuclear winter.

Kateryna Shadrina celebrates caring communities in images of people seeking shelter together and joining hands in a circle dance around the Tree of Life

Hlafira Shcherbak takes us to dark places in dark times. She shows faces in an inferno, bringing to mind the story in the Hebrew Scriptures of the three youths in the fiery furnace. In a second harrowing image, a winged soul struggles to break free from confining nets. Christ as a fellow suffer appears in both icons, offering hope to the Ukrainian people in their time of greatest need.

Oksana Andrushchenko, a new West Ukrainian icon-maker in our listings, paints exuberantly-colored canvases rich in decoration, looking at the ways the war has given people a deeper connection to the places where they live and the objects that surround them. “Life triumphs,” she says. “This is Ukraine.”