Hay panel series

About the work

The Hay panels, from the installation Perfect Inheritance.

"The project began with the history of my father's side of the family, who in the nineteenth century were serfs and who, during collectivisation, ended up on a collective farm with no way to leave. Only my grandmother eventually managed it.

The work took its cue from the constants of peasant life — hay and straw, what remains after the grain is threshed — and against them I set a refined material: porcelain."

Why porcelain?

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries one source of a nobleman's income was the export of grain and flax grown on his estates by his serfs: grain in the black-earth provinces, flax in the central non-black-earth ones, where grain yields were low. With the proceeds, and to underline their standing, the nobility bought luxury goods — invariably including porcelain vases, dinner services and figurines. Porcelain collections were a matter of pride, displayed in estate cabinets; in the residences of the highest aristocracy and of the imperial family, whole rooms were given over to them.

"I make porcelain 'hay' by an experimental technique. Through the firing, the low is transformed into the high, the common into the elite, exposing the arbitrariness of strata that stood unbroken for centuries and limited human freedom.

For hundreds of years hay was a consumable, something underfoot — as were the peasants who were born, worked and died with no one recording their names. Choosing deliberately to look at history another way, I show the hay at eye level, and so make it an object worth contemplating."