OAF wishes everyone happy Pride Week! Today we’ll present a work-in-progress update from our Residency artists Ton Melnyk & Masha Ravlyk regarding their work “Our Queer Family”:
“The tapestry Our Queer Family was started in June 2024 with the 4 months support from OAF and Taike. We, artist and queer activists from Kyiv, Masha Ravlyk and Ton Melnyk, began to weave 2×1,5 meters carpet because we are missing our community, created when we lived in Kyiv. Right now due to the war and due to the policies toward LGBTQI+ people, many people from this community live in different cities and countries, we rarely have an opportunity to meet.
One year ago Masha collected instruments around the community and bought wooden sticks for creating a frame. Polina Kuznetsova @polinakupolina, artist from Belarus, made a big wooden frame for our project and showed some basics about weaving. We ordered cotton base thread and colored wool threads, developed and printed the sketch, which took almost a month. The next step was putting base. We fitted 588 threads! And after pulling them we got the first problem: thick wooden sticks arched and the weaving system didn’t work. Polina figured out how to change the system. After 2 month of preparation we finally started to weave, meeting different kinds of problems that Polina helped us to solve. We weaved in August and September, but didn’t go far. We understood how this project is huge and labor-intensive and tried to find financial support for the continuation but didn’t get any grant. We went back to weaving in March 2025. In June 2 interns, students of Metropolia university, Emma @toivomuskaivo and Anni @annipusila, joined us. And now we are weaving in 4 people.
The tapestry is growing slowly but every day. We looked back and smiled at how in the beginning we tried to count hours needed for the work on tapestry to be done. We continue challenging problems, looking for the solution. And we keep going. During this project we got a lot of help and support from people we met in Finland. It feels like a project about one community creates another community.14.8.2025 during Night of the Arts in a frame of OAF we will present the tapestry Our Queer Family publicly for the first time. And 16.8.2025 in Pertti’s Choice Gallery we will have a workshop and talk about self-archiving together with friends and comrades depicted on the tapestry.”
Check out more pictures from the work from our Instagram post here.
Read more: Ton Melnyk and Masha Ravlyk Lukianova
