Originally from Ukraine, Olga Ermol is a visual artist based between Florence and Lisbon. She began painting at the age of nine and never stopped—she simply shifted materials and ways of thinking as her practice evolved. Her creative path has moved through graphic design, interior design, painting, and sculpture, and she is currently absorbed in fibre—a medium that creates room for reflection, grounding, and sensing life’s rhythm at a slower pace.
She studied Graphic Design at Winchester School of Art (UK), completed a Master’s in Sustainable Thinking at Goldsmiths (UK), and earned a second Master’s in Interior Design at Scuola Politecnica di Design (IT).
Drawing inspiration from Latin American Modernism and architectural language, Ermol works with colour as an emotional force—something that builds atmosphere, evokes memory and connects with the subconscious.
Her practice reflects an ongoing search for balance—between chaos and calm, structure and instinct, movement and stillness. Through a slow, tactile process, she turns emotion into form, creating spaces that invite the viewer to feel rather than analyse.
Your work sits at the intersection of precision and spontaneity. How do you navigate the balance between control and intuition when working with thread?
This is probably my favourite part of the process. The intuitive part happens during the conception. When I used to paint, everything happened directly on the canvas — pure flow, no plan. With thread, that level of spontaneity isn’t possible in the same way, because changing a colour or composition mid-way is wasteful and excruciatingly time consuming.
So now I sketch and experiment in Illustrator first. It has become my digital canvas. Once something clicks and I get that “gut feeling,” that’s when the precision begins. I draw the structure onto canvas and the slow, meditative threading starts. Even with the plan in place, I never fully know how the piece will look and feel until I finish it. That element of surprise keeps me in love with the process.
Having lived between Lisbon, Florence, and with roots in Ukraine, how do these different cultural environments shape your colour choices, rhythms, and compositions?
I experience places through architecture and energy. Florence is magical, but it’s also a “museum city” — grand, historical and “classic”. Being there made me long for brighter colours and modern shapes, i was lacking the playfulness. Lisbon is the opposite: full of colour, curved lines, textures, and vibrancy. It feels like a natural emotional landscape for my work.
But the biggest turning point was actually my years in Milan, studying interior design and absorbing mid-century architecture. Lina Bo Bardi’s honesty of material and Luis Barragán’s bold colour still overwhelm me. After a trip to Mexico five years ago, something clicked: I realised I wanted to “paint” with thread. That’s when this path truly began.
You come from a diverse creative background—painting, design, sculpture. What did fibre allow you to express that other mediums could not?
I’ve always loved colour and abstraction, but with painting I could not quite reach the emotional impact I admired in artists like Rothko. Perhaps it was a period of creative crisis. I wanted an expression through pure colour — something physical, saturated, and atmospheric.
When I discovered fibre, I finally felt that connection. I finally fell in love with my own work, and for me that is everything — it has to feel like love.
Fibre also lets me bridge my two passions: art and architecture. Working with thread feels inherently connected to interior space. I often create pieces imagining the environments they could live in.
Your pieces often respond to personal experiences—moments of exhilaration or quiet reflection. Can you share how a specific emotion or memory recently transformed into a work?
It’s rarely literal. I might go on an incredible hike or find a gorgeour abandoned building, and those moments fill me with a kind of internal electricity. Later, that energy spills into my work.
But one very specific moment did shape this new series: visiting Luis Barragán’s house in Mexico City earlier this year. It was a dream of mine for years, and being inside that space was overwhelming. When I returned, he became the starting point for Saturated Spaces. Using his emotional architecture as a reference opened up a whole new palette and new shapes for me.
Mid-century architecture and Latin colour palettes play a strong role in your visual language. What aspects of these influences resonate most with you, and how do you translate them into textile form?
Mid-century architecture — especially in Latin America — resonates with me because of its clarity, playfulness and emotional honesty. There’s a confidence in the way those spaces use material, shape, and colour. Barragán, for instance, used colour the way others use walls or light to build feeling and emotion.
What draws me in is the mix of calmness and boldness. The forms are simple, but the colour and materials carry warmth, nostalgia, intensity, and even tension. There’s always room to breathe — a kind of timeless elegance paired with playfulness.
I think I connect to it on a subconscious level. We all have our visual obsessions; mid-century modernism happens to be mine. I’m fascinated by how architecture from that era and the art developed in parallel speak to each other — different languages, but they fit effortlessly.
In my pieces, I treat thread almost architecturally - building through structure, rhythm, and colour, creating a space the viewer can step into. Colour sets the atmosphere, but the feeling comes from the person standing in front of it — their memories, their associations, their own inner world.
