Biography
Kateryna's path into art began with two inheritances: her mother's
devotion to intricate Hungarian craft, and her father's gift of the wide,
open Ukrainian seaside — above all, Dzharylhach Island. As a young woman,
hiking through mountainous country alongside a photographer, she learned
to read light, texture and the framing of a landscape.
Her route to a full-time practice was anything but linear. After an early
career in finance as a senior tax inspector, she gave fourteen years to a
heritage and arts charity, working alongside art historians and painters
to stage nine exhibitions of Ukrainian artists across London — including
one within Westminster Council — using art and heritage to champion
Ukrainian identity in the face of invasion and occupation.
When war forced her from Ukraine, Kateryna made a new home in London as a
refugee, together with her teenage daughter. In the upheaval, art turned
from a passion into a necessity — a sanctuary for holding loss, grief and
the disorientation of displacement. Through workshops with Accumulate, a
charity supporting people who have experienced homelessness, she built the
portfolio that won her a scholarship to study Art & Design at Morley
College, London. There her practice found its material language — humble,
salvaged elements pressed into service to carry the physical memory of
coastlines now beyond reach.
Working between the college studios and her own room in London, Kulishova
builds complex, tactile surfaces across printmaking, mixed-media painting
and relief. She embeds the natural and the reclaimed directly into the
work — salvaged dried oil paint, coastal chalk, sand, ground shell,
discarded plywood, waste coffee grounds — until each piece becomes a
topography you could almost run a hand across.
Turning loss, childhood memory and heritage into an enduring, physical
sanctuary remains the heart of her practice.
