Where do we invest

2023, Academy Of Fine Arts Prague

A research on sacrifice and cemetery flowers as symbols for spaces of remembrance, contemplation and transformation. What does the space between breathing in and breathing out, between the living and the inanimate look like? What sacrifices do we make and to whom? Is sacrifice an investment? 
Created during an internship in the sculptural studio of Tomas Hlavina and Chimena Mendosa.

In connection with death, memories and greetings are put into flowers. They become mediators between here and there, they send greetings to people, places, interests that are no longer with us, and that is why we carry them in our hearts. They depict the implementation of the past into the future, our capacity for growth and recovery. Flowers are taken as a metonymy for sacrifice. An object into which anything intimate is placed idolatrously, magically, animistically. The vehicles of reverence and affectionate greeting, acknowledging the existence of greater forces beyond our control.

By making sacrifices, we hope for a positive future. They are a reminder of hardships overcome, a symbol of our inner strength. We give up something precious in anticipation of atonement, fertility, redemption. We are therefore including something divine in the game. We may want to sway the powers on our side, but it is not helpful to think of them as a bargain with God that will bring us good in exchange for our renunciation. God, whatever that means to anyone, has no obligations and we cannot make precise demands on him. Sacrifice is the act of acting impractically, with joy or gratitude.

The flowers are hollow shells. The shaped reminiscences of softness (pillows, bread) let the clay speak in a raw way, and the unsharpened „unfocused“ shapes suggest the expanded and dull nature of the memory they carry within their hollow bodies. They symbolize a longing for a memory that does not fade, an affirmation of not forgetting. An object-sacrifice is there as a constant reminder of a strong emotion experienced for a person/place/thing, showing its inner importance.

Clay is left „out of place“, in a state of transformation between the living raw material and the dead resultant shape transformed by fire into a stone. Its left hanging in an in-between space where it no longer resists temporality, or the action of external natural forces. With the first firing it finds itself closer to the „inanimate“ side, even though it has not passed through the fire in its full transformative power. Smoked clay technique used, which turns the objects black with smoke from the fire, accentuates the moment of randomness and the abandonment of the illusion of full control over the course of things. The softness and a certain roughness of the shapes and the position of the material „somewhere in between“ – in the non-place – speaks of transference, contemplation and irrationality.