Forget Me Not

Forget Me Not brings together a wooden stool recovered from a house destroyed during a Russian attack on Kharkiv in 2022 and a group of slip-cast ceramic bricks marked by dark surfaces, fractures, and skin-like crackle glazes. The work places an ordinary domestic object in relation to fragile sculptural forms, allowing material damage, memory, and survival to occupy the same spatial structure.

The stool carries a direct connection to a specific place and lived environment. Removed from the damaged building, it no longer functions simply as furniture, but as a surviving artefact whose worn surface retains traces of use, displacement, and destruction. The ceramic bricks were developed through repeated experiments with casting, glazing, firing, and structural testing. Their cracked surfaces resemble peeling walls, damaged interiors, or skin altered by pressure, while the ceramic bodies remain physically present and capable of supporting the wider composition.

Rather than reconstructing the lost domestic space, the installation preserves the distance between what has survived and what can no longer be restored. The title draws on the familiar phrase "forget me not" as both a request and an act of remembrance, shifting attention from absence towards the responsibility to keep lived experience present.

Through the encounter between recovered object and transformed ceramic material, Forget Me Not reflects on how destruction becomes embedded in matter. The work approaches survival not as a return to an undamaged state, but as the continued presence of objects and histories that resist erasure while carrying visible evidence of rupture.