Drevo — Ukrainian for “tree” — is a collection of engraved steel panels by architect and artist Victoria Yakusha. At its core, Drevo is a meditation on the Tree of Life — Drevo zhyttia — a powerful, enduring symbol in Ukrainian folk tradition. For generations, women painted this motif onto the clay walls of their homes. It wasn’t decoration in the modern sense, but something more essential: a gesture of protection, a channel for energy, a way of embedding meaning into space. Painted above windows, on ovens, around doorways, these symbols turned homes into places that could breathe, protect, and hold memory.
The Drevo collection draws directly from those historical sources. Using archival ethnographic drawings from the Podillia region, Yakusha selected patterns once used in everyday village life and gave them a new, enduring form. The collection includes eighteen engraved steel panels, each shaped by hand and etched with traditional motifs: birds, branches, flowers, spirals — each with its own symbolic weight. At the center of nearly every composition is the Tree of Life. Its trunk connects the visible and invisible, the earthly and the divine. Its branches stretch toward continuity. Its roots reach back in time.
