Juliia Pylypchatina

Yuliia Pylypchatina (b. 1983, Artemivsk/Bakhmut, Ukraine) is a Kharkiv-based ceramic artist and illustrator whose practice reconstructs what history erased. Trained as a historian (Togliatti State University, 2005) and working internationally as a children’s book illustrator since 2008 (publications in Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey, Armenia, the UK, and Japan), she brings a narrative hand to clay—treating each vessel, tile, or piece of jewelry as a future heirloom.

Since founding her studio in 2014—and collaborating as a designer with Anthropologie in 2018—Pilipchatina has focused on porcelain forms finished with meticulous overglaze painting. Drawing on vernacular ornament, archival motifs, and invented heraldry, she creates objects that sit between utility and chronicle: intimate artifacts meant to stand in for the family relics repeatedly lost to wars, dispossession, and forced migrations across her region. Clay’s paradox—fragile yet enduring—mirrors the mechanics of memory in her work; surface painting operates like annotation, restoring names, symbols, and stories to everyday things. After a period in Belgium in 2022, she returned to Kharkiv in 2023, concentrating on overglaze-painted porcelain and ceramic jewel...