Returning to The Source

Returning to The Source is a time-based installation in which unfired ceramic bricks gradually dissolve beneath melting ice and water. The work brings together several strands of the artist's practice: earlier experiments with kinetic sculptures and meditation, her background in environmental policy, and her growing interest in reclaiming clay as both a sustainable process and a metaphor for transformation, impermanence, and return.

The fragile clay structures evoke damaged apartment blocks in Ukraine destroyed by Russian missiles and drones – images that have become part of the daily visual landscape of war for Ukrainians, whether encountered directly or through memory, distance, and continuous news circulation. Yet the work extends beyond destruction alone. As the bricks soften, collapse, and return to liquid matter, the installation reflects on time as a force that gradually absorbs pain, dissolves fixed form, and carries individual experience into collective history.

The work is also informed by Buddhist and Indian philosophical ideas surrounding impermanence, meditation, and moksha – spiritual liberation through the dissolution of attachment and ego. Water functions simultaneously as a destructive and healing force: it erodes the structures while returning them to a shared material source. The slow disappearance of the bricks suggests that buildings, bodies, identities, and suffering are all temporary states within a larger cycle of transformation. Rather than proposing restoration, Returning to The Source holds collapse, grief, release, and spiritual return within the same process, reflecting on fragility, healing, and the possibility of continuity beyond visible form.