We Become Strata

We Become Strata is a modular sculpture composed of twenty hand-cast ceramic bricks produced using plaster moulds and coloured slip. Fifteen bricks incorporate iron-rich soil personally collected by the artist in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. Rather than applying colour through glaze, the earth is embedded directly within the ceramic body, producing warm tonal variations after a single firing while preserving the tactile, uncoated quality of the surface.

Each of these bricks carries hand-painted motifs informed by the symbolic visual language found on ceramic vessels of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, which developed across present-day Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania between approximately 5500 and 2750 BCE. These forms are not reproduced as archaeological decoration, but reinterpreted through the artist's contemporary visual language, allowing inherited symbols to enter a new material and historical context.

The remaining five bricks are finished with glazes ranging from deep matte black to metallic surfaces. Their density and reflective variation introduce a visual counterpoint to the unglazed, earth-bearing elements, creating tension between opacity and illumination, continuity and rupture, archaeology and the present.

The modular structure allows the work to be repeatedly reconfigured, so no arrangement functions as a definitive or final form. Each configuration becomes another temporary layer within the life of the sculpture.

Through natural material, firing, repetition, and reassembly, We Become Strata considers cultural memory as something continually transformed rather than simply preserved. The work reflects on how histories accumulate within matter, becoming part of the physical and symbolic strata inherited by future generations.