Oksana Omelchuk on Fire, X-Rays, and Flowers as a Language for Feeling
The Kyiv-based visual artist and photographer on moving beyond documentation, mixing scanography, light and medical imagery, and why one well-chosen exhibition can matter more than dozens of random appearances.
In short: Oksana Omelchuk came to photography through painting, journalism, PR and economics, and gradually moved beyond treating the camera simply as a recording device. Across her series, she works with controlled fire, combines botanical imagery with X-rays, and uses light as a material in itself. Here she talks about the course that changed how she saw the medium, the improvisation behind every image, the collector at a Kyiv fair who did not need to understand the technique, and how a PR background shapes the way she builds her presence today.
For Oksana Omelchuk, a photograph is only where the work starts. “At some point it was no longer enough to show what I see,” she says. “I wanted to transform reality.” What follows the shutter is a mix of colour, form, light, scanography, digital collage, and X-ray and angiographic images, until the image becomes “a way of creating something that does not literally exist in reality, but that can be felt.”
From painting school to a new language
Omelchuk did not come to photography by a direct route. She studied painting, drawing, sculpture and applied arts at art school, then economics, and worked in journalism and PR. She sees each stage in the way she works now.
Journalism taught me to look for the story, PR to feel communication, and photography gave me a language in which I can speak without words.
The moment the medium changed for her came during Dimitri Bogachuk’s colour course at the Kyiv School of Photography, where students were introduced to projects by contemporary photographers. Until then, photography had mainly been a way to capture a beautiful moment. “Suddenly I saw that its possibilities were much wider.” Rules, she realised, could be broken, rethought, or replaced with her own.
Painting had already given her a way of seeing. She looks at a frame as a whole composition rather than a recorded object: how colours, light and shadow relate, where tension builds, where the image needs air, how one colour changes the perception of another. “Quite early on, I stopped thinking of photography as something you simply need to shoot correctly,” she says. She builds a frame almost the way a painter builds a canvas.
Bogachuk later became her curator. What she values most in that work is that it never stopped at making images. “We also talk about what happens afterwards: how to shape a project, position it, communicate it, present it and bring it to the art scene.” She still studies with him and takes part in projects he curates. Her studies continued at Form Photo Academy, the photographic education platform based in France.
On both sides of the lens
Before she photographed others, Omelchuk stood in front of the camera as a model. She knows how it feels to be looked at, assessed, asked to move and to change a pose or expression. When she moved behind the camera, her task became to create a situation in which a person can stay themselves.
She thinks about composition, light and angle, and wants to show a person beautifully, but not at the cost of character. “Not to turn a person into a frozen image, or an ideal but lifeless picture.” So she watches small things: a gesture, a glance, a turn of the head, a pause, how someone moves through space.
For me, a portrait is not only about appearance. I am always interested not only in what can be seen, but in what stands behind the visible.
Improvisation, until it says “this is it”
Most of her images begin with only an object chosen. There is no algorithm written in advance. At every stage she tests, changes, tries a new technique and decides by feel, following where the image itself leads.
Sometimes it really is a little like magic, shamanism, or a kind of art DJing: I mix techniques, colour, light and textures until a very clear feeling appears inside: Yes, this is it.
That is why one work can take two days and another two weeks. Speed matters less than the moment the image starts to live the way she feels it. The same instinct decides when a photograph stops documenting and begins to carry a state. She has no fixed boundary for it: she changes colour, light and form, adds or removes details, and watches what happens to the feeling of the frame. If it resonates, she keeps it. If not, “I keep tweaking it.”
Flowers that carry what words cannot
Flowers run through her strongest series. Fragility, changeability and vulnerability are already built into them, she says. “They are alive, but at the same time silent, and that is exactly why they can become translators of emotion.” Through them she moves between tenderness and calm, tension, recovery and strength. She does not give them human traits; she uses their form, colour and condition as a language for what is hard to say in words.
In The Garden of My Tenderness, ongoing since 2023, she scans real flowers and transforms them through digital drawing and painterly intervention. In 2024 she received silver awards in the flower categories of PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris and the Tokyo International Foto Awards.
Fire and X-rays: making the invisible visible
Her techniques usually start with a concept. She first understands which phenomenon or state she wants to explore, then looks for an unexpected visual language, and many decisions are born intuitively in the process.
In Flowers for Phoenix (2023–2024), scanned real flowers are exposed to controlled fire. “Physical fire becomes the visual equivalent of what cannot be seen directly: inner burning, emotional experience, metamorphosis.” What interests her is not the fire itself but what remains after it: a changed state, traces, the possibility of a new beginning. In 2024 the series won silver at the Budapest International Foto Awards.
X-rays entered her work earlier, in Abstract Feelings in a Concrete Body. In FLORA X (2025) she returned to them “to literally look beneath the surface.” Flowers and the human body meet there not as decoration, she says, but as two expressions of one natural logic: the beauty already built into a person by nature, with its fragility and structure.
That is why I am drawn to such methods: they let me work with what is usually hidden from the eye, and make the invisible part of the image.
A series ends when she feels she has said everything she wanted to say. Even then, life sometimes reopens it. She had practically finished one series when an X-ray came to her by chance and fitted it so precisely that another work appeared. “For me, a series is not a rigidly closed form but a living structure.”
Controlling the accident
Controlled Geometry (2023–2024) is built from scanography and light rather than classic collage. The first result was a surprise. “But as soon as I understood the principle, it became interesting not to wait for a random effect, but to learn to control it.” In the works that followed she deliberately controlled light, colour and the structure of the frame, holding on to what usually seems accidental and almost impossible to catch.
The same logic links her architecture and her organic forms. In both she looks for rhythm, balance, repetition, and tension between lines and space. Architecture gives a stricter structure and geometry; organic forms bring plasticity and natural unpredictability. In both cases she treats composition “as a system of relationships.”
Her references range widely. She keeps returning to Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Kandinsky and Helen Frankenthaler; in photography she loves Sarah Moon, and among contemporary artists she follows Niko Luoma, Erik Madigan Heck, Richard Learoyd and Albarran Cabrera. Films can win her over through light, colour and framing, or through an idea. But music is often where a project starts: she needs to find a certain sound wave, and then a visual sequence gradually forms. “I cannot summon inspiration on command,” she says. “My task is simply to be attentive enough not to miss it.”
When the work leaves the screen
Her work has been presented at numerous exhibitions and art fairs in Ukraine and internationally. Selected highlights include Photo London and ArtExpo New York in 2026, NEW VOICES at Galerie Joseph in Paris and ART KYIV in 2025, and ST-ART in Strasbourg and the Barcelona Biennale in 2024. For her, the move from a screen into an exhibition hall is always significant. Scale, paper, light and the viewer change how a work is perceived. But emotionally, what matters most is the sense that the work has been seen, selected and placed in a professional context. “What you worked on alone suddenly becomes part of real artistic life. And then you feel very sharply: it was not in vain.”
One moment stays with her in particular. At Art Market in Kyiv in 2024 she made her first sale at a fair. Talking about the work, the collector told her:
I have no idea how you made this. I just want to look at it every day.
It showed her that a viewer does not need to know the technique or the concept down to the last detail to feel a connection with a work. “That was probably when I first truly felt that what I do finds a response beyond my own world.”
A PR toolkit for her own brand
The art market is crowded, she says, so strong work is no longer enough on its own; it needs the right context around it. That context comes from professional points of contact: gallerists, curators, collectors, other artists, media and strong art communities. “Not in the sense of useful connections, but as an environment where dialogue, trust, new opportunities and an understanding of where your practice belongs can emerge.”
One well-chosen exhibition, publication or professional contact can matter more than dozens of random appearances. Noise begins where the wish to be visible becomes more important than the work itself.
Her PR years gave her a practical grasp of communication: who the audience is, what genuinely interests them, what you are transmitting and what only adds noise. Strategy, visual presentation, content, positioning and monitoring are built on that. “In fact, I use the same tools I worked with before — corporate, personal and even crisis PR — only now I work for my own artistic brand.” Journalism helps with texts: formulating a thought, cutting what is unnecessary, building structure. With her website, she once set technical and visual tasks for a team; today she writes the brief, plans the structure, layouts and logic of presentation herself. “Only now this brand is mine.”
She approaches the many roles practically. Becoming a mother taught her to hold dozens of processes at once; after that, several professional roles do not feel extraordinary. She likes to control the process and understand how communication, content, presentation and sales work, but she does not do everything alone. When she takes part in a specific exhibition or fair together with a gallery, the gallery takes on part of the organisation, which lets her focus on the work. What matters is knowing enough to understand the whole process, and knowing what can and should be delegated.
One system, many doors
Her channels work together rather than separately. Her personal website is the main professional point, with the fullest picture of her practice, series, exhibitions, publications and contacts. Instagram is livelier and less formal: it shows exhibitions, travel, process and interests, and partly the person behind the practice. Open calls take her into new professional contexts, from exhibitions and fairs to platforms and publications, and media help her reach people who might otherwise never hear of her. Her recent publications include VOGUE Philippines, All About Photo and Dodho Magazine, and the books 101 Art Book: Photography Edition and 100 Contemporary Ukrainian Photographers.
A person may first see a work in the media or on Instagram, and then go to the website and form a complete picture of the artist there.
A screen cannot fully replace the physical experience, she says: you do not feel the real scale, the texture of the paper, the light, or the presence of the object in a room. But online has one enormous advantage, accessibility. Someone in any country can see a work, learn about the series, the artist and the technique, look at other projects and get in touch straight away. For her, digital presentation is not a substitute for an exhibition but another space for the work to exist: a way to widen its audience, give it a longer life and create new points of encounter with the viewer.
That is also how she sees Digital Original: as a professional space to bring series, individual works, the information about them and available pieces together in one place. She is most interested in what extends the usual online portfolio, such as detailed viewing of works, her own domain, and digital and immersive formats “where the image can exist not only on the flat surface of a screen.” What she would like from artist platforms in general is more freedom for an artist to build a whole space around the work that matches their visual language, “not just upload works into a catalogue.”
Planes take off against the wind
She was once afraid to show her work too, so her advice to artists who already have their own language but hesitate is direct. First ask yourself honestly whether you really want it. “If the answer is yes, then you need to look for ways, not reasons to postpone.” Doubts, rejections and failed attempts will come anyway. “But planes also take off against the wind.” The first step does not have to be big: submit to an open call, show one series, send a portfolio. “The main thing is to give yourself a chance to see what happens if you try.”
She is now continuing several series and working on two fundamentally new projects, in a somewhat different key, with more room for experiment. They are still taking shape. Whatever form they take, they will start the way her work always has: with a photograph that is only the first layer, and a feeling she keeps tweaking until it says “this is it.”
Explore Oksana Omelchuk’s series on her website, oksanaomelchuk.com, and follow her on Instagram at @oxana_omelchuk. To see how other artists and photographers present their work, explore more artist websites in the Digital Original showcase.
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