What Holds Us Together

What Holds Us Together is a modular ceramic sculpture composed of interdependent slip-cast bricks arranged in an open, balanced structure. Developed from white earthenware and iron-rich soil from Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, the work brings material memory, place, and inherited visual language into a contemporary sculptural form.

The soil is incorporated directly into the ceramic body rather than applied as surface colour, allowing the material itself to carry tonal variation and geographical presence. Across the bricks, hand-painted patterns draw on motifs associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, a prehistoric civilisation active across present-day Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. These forms are not reproduced as archaeological ornament, but reinterpreted through the artist's contemporary visual language, allowing ancient systems of mark-making to enter a new context of reflection and rebuilding.

The sculpture does not rely on enclosure or monumentality. Its stability emerges through relation: through contact points, spacing, counterbalance, and the mutual support of separate elements. Each brick remains distinct, yet no part functions entirely alone. The structure is therefore held together not by fusion, but by a fragile and deliberate negotiation between autonomy and dependence.

Within the wider context of the artist's modular ceramic practice, What Holds Us Together reflects on the invisible structures that form a sense of commonality – memory, land, shared histories, and the repeated effort to remain connected under pressure. The work approaches togetherness not as fixed unity, but as a living condition sustained through difference, relation, and continual acts of balance.