The work is an installation of porcelain sculptures reminding architectural objects looking ambiguously either unfinished in construction or in a state of dilapidation. In some of the hollow shapes small speakers are hidden transmitting real and easily recognizable sounds of human dwelling: footsteps, door squeaking, snoring, baby crying etc.
Here we see the deserted abodes inhabited only by someone’s vague memories. A search for the place in the sun metaphorically represented in a deliberate approximation of the archetypal shapes of lodgings, habitations or shelters. The extremely trivial sounds of mundane life contrast against the emptiness desolated site. This is human space, decisively unclear whether unclaimed or abandoned.
Places in the sun
2012
Installation. Porcelain, audiotape
Transformation
2008
Grog clay, fresh red potter’s clay, onglaze painting, pumpkin sprout
The object represents a composition of four square ceramic plates in a checkered arrangement. Two of them are full of fresh potter’s clay with sprouting pumpkin seeds. The other two contain glazed ceramic tiles with drawings of pumpkin seeds painted over the glaze in the traditional technique.
In the process of the exhibition the plants change in dimension. As the surface of the clay dries it becomes covered with a grid of cracks. The original “picture” is transformed without the participation of the artist. At a certain point the actual state of the living plants corresponds to the drawing of the plants, fixating reality for a short period of time. Being independent of outside influence, the moment of fixation is impossible to calculate. The final stage of the exhibition shows the self-destruction of a work with “living” elements, as the clay naturally dries and kills the sprouts.
Moist clay is a substance within which living matter evolves. Fired clay is static, conservative. The firing is an act that reflects the dying of a living substance and at the same time the birth of a ceramic work of art. Transformation, which is the transition from one state of the clay into another, also expresses the transition from living to non-living nature. The idea of transitional phases expressed by this work is exemplified in the contrast between clay as an environment that gives life and then takes life from plants, and clay as a stable surface for the representation of the image of the plant.
Natalia Khlebtsevich believes that human creativity replicates the activity of nature, which doesn’t mean copying its final specimens. The artists provokes the behavior of material and challenges it to act on its own giving it the freedom to proceed in a chosen environment. The interplay and contest of the artist and the elemental forces of the material results in shapes and forms antecedently nonexistent but concordant to nature’s logic.
Since the Renaissance the Curiosity Сabinets have been known as a form of a private museum. The collection could be limited to just a glass case filled with favorite keepsakes, oddities, bibelots etc. Sometimes, among the fossils, bones and stuffed animals, objets d’art and object de vertue could be found. Evidently, the collectors equated the samples of nature ingenuity and art or artisanal skill.
In Samples to emulate there is no intention to astonish with rarities. In our times of informational excess there is no exotic left to marvel. As noted by Levi Strauss, nowadays the spices for which the seafarers of the past risked their lives can be found on a shelf of an ordinary grocery.
Here in this cabinet the testimonies of nature’s creativity are pigeonholed alongside with artist’s exercises imitating the process of biological development. The juxtaposition of real found objects and handmade simulacra demonstrates a special case of creativity, when the artist, instead of copying or mimicking the nature, explores the nature’s methodology to produce things new never seen before.
Samples to emulate
2013
Installation. Porcelain, found objects.
The rusted hand wrought nails are the remnants of an ancient wooden structure, perished due to time, elements or evil intent. The iron used to hold together the enclosure of a simple mortal’s dwelling, or a temple where God listened to pleading for immortality. The orphaned nails keep the memory of lives extinct in oblivion and by the free will of an artist serve as a silent liturgy, showing the sprouting roots as a sign of hope for resurrection.
Lucky Nails
2013
Installation. Wrought iron nails, wood, glass, water, plant roots
