The Garden of My Tenderness by Oksana Omelchuk

''The Garden of My Tenderness'' is a personal reflection on vulnerability, inner growth, and the quiet strength that exists within sensitivity. The series was born in winter - a season when the world feels stripped back, and the longing for warmth, flowers, and tenderness becomes especially acute. It is within this contrast between external cold and inner need that the garden began to take shape.

Through floral forms, I explore emotional states that often remain unseen: tenderness, fragility, longing, and resilience. Rather than treating these qualities as weakness, I approach them as vital forces - subtle yet persistent sources of life and transformation.

The works are created using scanography of real flowers, later transformed through digital drawing and painterly interventions. Coming from a background in visual art, I intentionally blur the boundary between photography and drawing, allowing each image to exist somewhere between captured reality and an imagined space. The flowers originate in the physical world, yet are displaced into a suspended, timeless environment where it is unclear whether they float in air, water, or memory.

This ambiguity mirrors the nature of inner experience itself - fluid, intangible, and difficult to define. Color and digital brushwork are used to soften the photographic surface, allowing the image to move away from documentation and toward sensation.

In ''The Garden of My Tenderness'', flowers are not decorative symbols but metaphors of the inner body - living forms that carry emotion, memory, and transformation. The project invites the viewer into a quiet, contemplative space where reality and imagination overlap, and where tenderness reveals itself as a form of resistance, growth, and light.





Oksana Omelchuk
Oksana Omelchuk is a Kyiv-based visual artist and contemporary photographer working at the intersection of fine art, architecture, and experimental photography.
A multiple award winner of international photography competitions, she has developed a distinctive visual language that blurs the boundaries between photography and visual art.

She began her professional artistic journey in 2021 at the Kyiv School of Photography, where photography quickly evolved from a field of study into her life’s work.
Oksana later continued her education at Form Photo Academy in France, deepening her conceptual and artistic approach.

Holding a master’s degree in Economics and with a background in journalism and PR, Oksana consciously challenges the traditional hierarchy of image and text.
In her practice, photography is not an illustration of a story—it is the primary message itself, accompanied by subtle, reflective storytelling.

With a strong foundation in fine art and over six years of formal art education, she works across photography, scanography, and digital techniques, creating images that exist between reality and imagination.
Her practice focuses on emotional resonance and philosophical depth, transforming everyday subjects into spaces for reflection and inner dialogue—engaging both heart and mind.

Oksana’s works have been featured on LensCulture and published internationally in VOGUE Italia, All About Photo Magazine, ARTDOC Photography Magazine, Dodho Magazine, and FotoNostrum Magazine, as well as in the book 100 Contemporary Ukrainian Photographers published by Form.Paris.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Ukraine, Spain, France, and Poland, and is held in private collections in Ukraine, France, and the United States.
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