Slava Salyuk’s roots are in Lviv, Ukraine, where she began her career as a fashion designer and currently maintains a successful interior design studio. However, it was her early exposure to the necklaces created by her father, artist Liubart Lishchynskyj, that sparked her true passion. She began learning at her father’s side and completed his unfinished works when he became ill. Over time she has discovered her own voice and style, exploring the connections between countries and continents where images and objects unexpectedly, almost magically, overlap. Already fluent in the traditional Ukrainian motifs for which her father was known, she became intrigued by the similarity of women’s ethnic jewelry from different cultures and periods. As she assembled her collection of materials from sources throughout the world she observed that, for example, an 18th century Ethiopian cross may easily be mistaken for a cross made in Kyiv in the 13th century, or that a Coptic cross might bear similar motifs to those found on Hutsul carved beams and chests. These observations were the beginning of what became her exhibition Geography, which has been three years in the making. Geography is a unique journey in time and space where images from Nepal to Yemen to Africa to the Ukrainian Carpathians can exhibit almost mystical relationships between cultures whose paths have never crossed. Slava observes: “Strikingly similar ideas came to people at different times and in different places, and similar things were considered beautiful on the opposite side of our planet. Perhaps, then, can we assume that beauty, after all, is not such a subjective attribute but actually is universal, completely objective, and not subject to time?” Slava Salyuk uses a variety of materials as diverse as semi-precious stones, Venetian glass, Hutsul and Coptic crucifixes, silver coins, and beads to create necklaces that retain unique elements of a cross-cultural past while interpreting them in a contemporary context.