Inspired by Space II continued the international art and education project we had begun in Lviv in 2016. We returned to the Botanical Garden of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, this time with a new group of students. I wanted to build on the previous experience by exploring further how an artwork can interact with a living natural environment.

Once again, we worked at the intersection of art, design, and experimentation with materials. Art glass played a central role. Among the living plants appeared glass forms resembling branches, drops, frozen water, or icy tears. The transparent glass caught natural light and reflected the greenery and sky. It changed throughout the day, seeming to return the garden’s own colours to it in another form.

What interested me was that these objects did more than complement the landscape. They changed how we perceived it. At times they intensified something already present; at others they suggested unexpected associations or prompted us to look more closely at an ordinary branch, leaf, drop of water, or ray of light.

Alongside the artworks, we developed objects with a functional aspect. Glass beehives, interpretations of insect houses, and other experimental forms raised questions about how people coexist with other living systems. An ecological dimension became increasingly clear: what might a human space be like if we understood nature as an environment of which we are a part?

The experience also evoked for me a sense of primordial creation. Working with natural forms, light, plants, earth, and materials felt almost like rediscovering the simplest principles by which things take shape, but through contemporary artistic tools and technologies.

This meeting of an ancient sense of making with contemporary means became one of the most compelling aspects of Inspired by Space II for me. The objects were not brought into nature as finished works; they emerged through direct contact with the place.

The project again brought students and teachers together in practical work. For the younger participants, it was a chance to move beyond a familiar classroom assignment, work with new materials, scales, and surroundings, and see how an artistic idea changes in response to a real space.

Inspired by Space II marked the next stage in my personal shift from the picture plane to the environment: from painted composition to spatial experience, and from the artwork as an independent object to the artwork as part of a living landscape.