ZHYTOMYR – Ukraine is world famous for its embroidery. Less well known is that one of its most impressive artisans plies her trade without the benefit of arms or legs.
Still, Lydia Lysaychuk’s reputation is growing. The Zhytomyr-based artist received the title of master of embroidery earlier this year and her work has been featured in more than a dozen exhibitions across the country. Over the past decade her intricate designs – depicting everything from the heroes of Kyivan Russ folklore to religious themes – have decorated the homes of a growing number of admirers.
“Lysaychuk is a unique master,” said Mykola Martsynuk, head of Association of Masters of Folk Crafts and Creative Works. “She knows the technique of embroidering very well, and her embroideries are simply perfect.”
But what makes Lysaychuk’s accomplishment especially impressive is that though her limbs were amputated as a lifesaving measure following a childhood illness, her disability didn’t stop her from learning to embroider.
“I’ve made so many embroideries that I could cover the road from Zhytomyr to Kyiv,” she revealed during a recent meeting in her Zhytomyr home.
Nowadays, Lysaychuk is working on a collection to be displayed at a craft fair, featuring the works of Swiss and Ukrainian artists. It is scheduled to be held in Kyiv on Oct. 11. A wide range of women’s organizations and companies founded by women will be on hand to show off and sell their products. Lysaychuk says she’s determined to take part, even though rental space is going for a hefty $500.
“Even if I have to spend my entire pension, I’ll be there,” she said.
She may get assistance from the Zhinka Dlya Zhinky (Women for Women) center, where she originally learned about the fair.
“We would really like Lysaychuk to go there and are looking for ways to help her,” said center director Iryna Babenko. “It will be a chance for her creative works be shown and a way for her to find financial support.”
If that happens, it will be wonderful – though the support of others is not something Lysaychuk has had to rely on.
She doesn’t like to talk about the sickness she had before she started school as a young girl. She will only say that it involved many injections and an operation, during which doctors chose to amputate her arms and legs in order to save her life. It worked.
Lysaychuk survived and went on to attend the Khmelnytsky School for the Physically Disabled. And already by seventh grade, she said she realized there would be a time when she wouldn’t have her parents to care for her. So she hit the books and learned to write using her teeth.
Eventually she took up sewing and knitting – even though she was initially excused from taking those subjects because of her disability.
“First I visited those lessons and I watched,” she recalled. “Then I tried doing it by myself – and I got it.”
Despite her missing limbs, she also had no problem reading or working with numbers and graduated from the Kharkiv College of Economics and Calculation in 1981. But it was a subsequent move to Zhytomyr that changed her life forever.
It was there that she became interested in embroidery after watching her sister-in-law stitch a beautiful design. Before she knew it, Lysaychuk had begun producing original embroidery of her own, developing a system for sewing using her mouth and shoulders.
It was painstaking work, she recalls, and it remains so. Complex pieces can take up to four months to complete, though she’s been able to amass more than 1,000 original pieces.
“I’m able to do everything other artists can do, just more slowly,” she said.
Just watching how she is able to single-handedly manage her home, it’s easy to see that her disability isn’t much of a handicap. She jumps to answer the phone, eats a snack and drinks tea using only her shoulders and chin.
“You can’t imagine how proud and happy I am when I discover that I’m able to do things,” Lysaychuk said. “I always told everybody that I would have my own apartment where I wouldn’t have to depend on anybody and where I would do everything by myself.”
