CASTLE OF CHILDHOOD
Castle of Childhood is a small architecture of memory — a building assembled from the details of Kherson, the city where I grew up.
Kherson’s old centre is full of ornamented facades from the early twentieth century — decorated, slightly impossible buildings I thought of as castles when I was a child.
This piece is not a portrait of any one of them. It is the city as a child saw it: arches, windows like eyes, weird elements, like a fairy tale.
Work in progress, Massana Art School, 22/01/2026
26 Soborna Street, Kherson, 2018
Since 2022, the city has lived through occupation and is shelled daily. Much of what shaped this piece no longer exists in the form I remember.
The work holds that earlier form — not as documentation, but as memory: selective, softened, and mine.
26 Soborna Street, Kherson, 2026
The piece belongs to a body of work about what a person carries in order to remain themselves. A home that can no longer be visited does not disappear. It changes address.
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This building was built in 1915 by David Peysakhovych Buntselman — a Kherson-based Jewish architect who also worked as a painter. He designed the building in the Romantic Modernist style, with deliberate references to medieval castles. Originally it was the European Hotel, the most elegant in the city.
THE COURTYARD
I grew up in a shared courtyard full of trees — none of them ours. Apricots, pears, apples, sour cherries, and the occasional sweet cherry we treated like a rare treasure. We ate the fruit unripe, climbing where we could, picking quickly when no one was watching. I loved green apricots best. Sometimes someone caught us and we ran wherever our legs took us.
It didn’t feel like a city. It felt like a village. Three buildings around one shared space — a five-storey block, a two-storey house where I lived, and a small one behind them. A road ran through the yard down to the river, and that gave the place its own particular magic. Everything was green. Everything was full. The whole map of what life could be was a few steps from my door.
Kherson, my house 1/09/2016
Castle of Childhood
hand-built partly glazed stoneware, 2026
Available on request