Last year my daughter has departed to university in another country. I was proud for her getting in a great school, starting an exciting new period of her life, opening new horizons. And yet at the same time I felt bitter and sad realizing that at the same time it was the end of a big period in my life. The reminders of her absence were stark and omnipresent - serving one plate less at dinner, disappearance of her shoes from the house entrance, her orphaned long unused teacup or her hair clip randomly popping up somewhere. All these things filled me with emotions of abandonment and solitude. This in-betweens of past and future crept into my life and took  place of the present.

For my project, I tried to encapsulate that mood and feelings about somebody’s absence. The absence of my daughter has positive sides like excitement and hopes for the best in her future, but for someone who lost their loved ones forever, for example, due to a pandemic, it could be utterly sad and despairing.

I used my daughter’s room pictures together with stoneware tiles that contained the traces of her child, teenage and adult shoes. In front, there are shoes wrapped into porcelain cloths, which I developed under the impression of Christo’s posthumous and grandest wrapping that of L’Arc de Triomphe. Wrapped shoes give the sense of packing for a long road, in my case from childhood to adolescence and then finally to adult life.

All three elements give the senses of a lonely space, traces of some things which are not there anymore and contained volume which might be already empty underneath.

2022