Kinder Album
‘Bones’ series, 2022-2025, ceramics
The artist works with painting, graphics, sculpture, ceramics, weaving, photography, installation, street art and video art. Kinder Album engages with themes related to the body and corporeality. Before the full-scale invasion, her practice focused mainly on Eros, but following the outbreak of the great war, the themes of sexuality and intimacy shifted towards Thanatos: the loving body—the dying body. The context of war led the artist to a heightened awareness of her own artistic expression and gave Kinder Album’s works a political tone.
In her artistic practice, she often uses materials and techniques traditionally associated with decorative art. Yet Kinder Album transforms them into a tool of critical expression, where aesthetic qualities of the material serve to reveal and intensify the idea: ‘The material is what inspires me, with what I begin’.
For Kinder Album, clay is a material from which everything, any object, can be created: ‘When I want something to exist in the world, I can take clay and make it, and it will exist’. The ceramic series ‘Bones&Limbs’ combines works from two cycles, ‘Bones’ and ‘Limbs’, both created during the full-scale war. The ‘Limbs’ series explores individual body parts symbolising an intermediate state between life and death. Images of human limbs severed from the body have come to be perceived as another symbol of war within the context of the ongoing traumas of civilians and soldiers caused by russian shelling and landmining. The ‘Bones’ series is based on the image of the archaeological landscape—finds of artworks from cultures that inhabited the territory of Ukraine thousands of years ago. The artist asks what would remain of us. Ceramic bones from which flowers grow unite the ideas of death and life and of their inextricable connection. Even if death is inevitable, life must follow.
