‘heritage is not a static archive’: GUNIA on reinventing ukraine’s craft and material traditions
GUNIA, the pope, and an angelic Christmas plate
Back in 2019, Natalia Kamenska and Maria Gavryliuk, founders of Ukrainian fashion and design brand Gunia, designed a Christmas tableware collection. In it, white ceramic pieces had cherubs and lambs illustrated across their surface, motifs that appear both in everyday and religious images across the country. When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the Vatican in 2020, he presented one of these creations to Pope Francis – a symbol of the country’s continued legacy for both maintaining and reinventing its cultural crafts.
Gunia ceramics | all images courtesy of Gunia
IN CONVERSATION WITH Natalia Kamenska & Maria Gavryliuk
Not only does Gunia play with Ukrainian imagery in swirling and colorful illustrations, but the very materiality of the work is also derived from material traditions ties to the country. In describing the ‘Gunia universe,’ the brand explains that it works by, ‘bringing together nine artisanal techniques: blown (guta) glass, weaving, embroidery, wood carving, ceramics, silver and bead jewellery, knitting, and basketry.’ In conversation with Kamenska and Gavryliuk, designboom delves into their journey with Gunia and how they’ve brought their contemporary vision to historic practices.
The two founders had a traditional background in the fashion industry before embarking on this project. ‘Fashion taught us a lot about design, aesthetics, and production, but we found ourselves drawn to objects that carried memory, meaning, and a deeper connection to culture,’ the duo explains. ‘Gunia Project began not as a business idea but as a process of research. We started visiting museums, studying archives, traveling across Ukraine, meeting artisans, and discovering how much knowledge, beauty, and complexity existed within traditional culture. Our relationship to design shifted from creating something new for the sake of novelty to creating something meaningful through research. Today, every object starts with a story, a symbol, a historical reference, or a cultural question rather than a trend forecast.’
ceramics manufacturing process
The namesake wool coat and the weavers behind it
In one of their short films about the craftspeople they work with, Gunia brings us to the loom of Natalia Kishchuk, a weaver that they work with. Watching Kishchuk at work, she explains how the Gunia, the hand-woven wool coat from which the brand took its name, was a traditional work garment in the region. She talks about the amount of sheep that will need to be sheared to make the contemporary gunia for the brand, reflecting on how the way she spins yarn from the raw wool was passed down to her from her grandmother.
a contemporary Gunia coat, a traditional Ukrainian garment made from wool, redesigned by the brand
Managing a network of artisans across Ukraine
Kishchuk is just one artisan in the network of over 150 Ukrainian craftspeople Gunia collaborates with to develop their products. ‘Managing such a network is both inspiring and complex because every collaboration operates differently,’ Kamenska and Gavryliuk explain.‘We work with artisans, workshops, and manufacturers across Ukraine, but there is no single model. Sometimes a particular craft technique inspires the object itself. A weaving method, a ceramic process, or a glassmaking tradition can become the starting point for an entirely new design. In other cases, we come with a very clear concept and work together to find the best technical way to bring it to life.’
The collaboration process is always a dialogue, with artisans often contributing invaluable technical knowledge, suggesting adaptations or solutions that improve the final object while remaining faithful to the nature of the craft. For the two founders, preserving these traditional crafts is equally important as finding a way to bring them into the world of contemporary design. ‘We are interested in reinterpretation rather than reproduction — developing new objects that are rooted in culture yet belong to contemporary life. At the same time, it is very important for us that these techniques continue to live, evolve, and be passed on to future generations. We hope that by bringing traditional crafts into contemporary design, more people will see them not only as a hobby or part of cultural heritage, but as a viable professional practice. For craft traditions to survive, they need to remain relevant, create opportunities, and attract new makers.’
Gunia beadwork process
One of the most valuable lessons the two founders have learned from working with makers across different regions of Ukraine has been understanding that culture survives through relationships. ‘Many artisans learned their craft from parents, grandparents, relatives, or neighbors. Their knowledge exists not only in objects but in human connections. Working with them has shown us how fragile and precious these chains of transmission can be. We have also learned that collaboration begins with listening. Some of our most successful projects emerged not because we arrived with all the answers, but because we allowed space for dialogue and mutual learning.’
clothing making process
naïve art, the Gunia project and the power of aesthetics
The Gunia project at large pulls aesthetically from naïve art, folk symbolism, and traditional iconography. In the loose hand drawn styles that characterize their pieces, there is a sense that the work visually resists the current model of high-volume, industrialized production. ‘What attracts us to naïve art is its honesty,’ says the duo of building on this genre of visual art. ‘It is often free from professional conventions and speaks through intuition, emotion, and personal experience. There is a directness in it that feels surprisingly contemporary.
We feel similarly about craftsmanship. In a world increasingly shaped by automation and mass production, the human hand becomes more valuable, not less. Imperfections, variations, and traces of process remind us that a real person was involved in creating an object. We also believe that Ukrainian folk and naïve art belong within a broader global conversation about vernacular and naïve artistic traditions. They deserve to be seen not only as local heritage but as part of a universal cultural phenomenon.’
What inspires Natalia Kamenska and Maria Gavryliuk the most is the possibility of creating contemporary design objects that carry cultural memory into everyday life. ‘For us, an object is never just an object. While we can embed references, stories, and meanings into a piece, its final meaning is always created by the person who lives with it. Objects become part of rituals, family histories, and personal memories, acquiring new layers of meaning over time.’
ceramic works at one of the brand’s manufacturing facilities
Ukrainian craft and symbols beyond books and museums
Every Gunia collection begins with deep ethnographic research and museum archives. ‘Research is always the beginning, but never the final goal,’ say Kamenska and Gavryliuk, whose role is then to interpret these historical references into a contemporary context. ‘When we encounter a historical object, we are not interested in reproducing it exactly. Instead, we try to understand what makes it meaningful — whether it is a symbol, a technique, a composition, or a worldview.’ They then translate those ideas into contemporary forms, materials, and functions. ‘We want people to recognize the cultural roots of an object while feeling that it belongs naturally in contemporary life. For us, preservation and reinterpretation are not opposites. Respectful reinterpretation is often one of the strongest forms of preservation because it allows traditions to remain relevant and visible.’
One of the brand’s main goals is to take traditions and cultural heritage out of the glass vitrine and into the present. ‘Museums are essential because they preserve culture, but culture truly remains alive only when it becomes part of everyday life,’ the two explain. ‘A plate used during dinner, a scarf worn regularly, or a candle lit at home creates a different relationship with heritage than an object observed behind glass. We are interested in making culture tangible and lived. When people encounter these references daily, they stop seeing heritage as something distant and begin experiencing it as part of their own identity.’
jewelry making
DOWRY objects AND A ‘NEW KIND OF HERITAGE’
Gunia often compares their pieces to traditional dowry objects. When asked about the role physical objects with history and memory play in our lives, the two explain: ‘We often think about objects as carriers of memory. Some of the most meaningful objects people own are not necessarily the most valuable in monetary terms. They are the objects connected to family stories, rituals, travels, celebrations, or important life moments. Today we live in a culture of constant replacement, yet people still long for continuity. Objects can provide that continuity. They accompany us through different stages of life and sometimes outlive us. This is why we are interested in creating pieces that people want to keep, repair, display, use, and eventually pass on. In that sense, design becomes part of a much larger story than the object itself.’
The word ‘Project’ in the brand’s identity reflects an ongoing journey of research and experimentation, one that shapes a ‘new kind of heritage‘ for the future. ‘We do not see heritage as something fixed or frozen in time. Every generation inherits culture, reinterprets it, and contributes something of its own. In that sense, heritage is not only what we receive from the past, but also what we choose to pass forward.’
Reflecting on their creative role and hope for future generations, Kamenska and Gavryliuk say that they hope they ‘will inherit not only objects but also a curiosity about culture, a willingness to learn from it, and confidence to reinterpret it. If previous generations preserved traditions, perhaps our role is to help them continue evolving. We want to demonstrate that heritage is not a static archive but a living, changing conversation between the past, present, and future.’
Gunia Project showroom in Kyiv, Ukraine
the Gunia project at large pulls aesthetically from naïve art, folk symbolism, and traditional iconography
Gunia has two showrooms in ukraine and other stockists around the world
Gunia often compares their pieces to traditional dowry objects
Gunia works with a network of over 150 craftspeople across ukraine to make their collections
huta glass manufacturing in Ukraine
a loom at the beginning stages of creating a textile
project info:
brand: GUNIA | @gunia_project
designers: Natalia Kamenska and Maria Gavryliuk | @kamenska.n and @maria.gavryliuk
This article is part of designboom’s Crafting the Future chapter, exploring what it means to be a maker in today’s world and the future of craftsmanship. Discover more related stories here.
The post ‘heritage is not a static archive’: GUNIA on reinventing ukraine’s craft and material traditions appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
