Orchidaceae

Orchids. The first one I saw came in packaging that resembled a perfume bottle. This was the late 1990s in Russia, and orchids had only just become available to people in any ordinary sense. Before that they existed in pictures, in botanical gardens. To receive one was a gift of luxury. It looked like a promise of a beautiful life.

The packaging had a small plastic window through which it seemed I could see the future, a promise of a beautiful life filled with goods and pleasure. A wild capitalist dream on the fall of the Soviet state. The orchid appeared preserved, the stem suspended in liquid, sealed. I don't know whether the orchid was, in fact, preserved, but the freedom of that time was not.

Yet at the time the promise felt real. The freedom filled every hole where other things like money or food, were lacking. The struggle was temporary, the struggle believed to be for the better. Opportunities. The popular culture of those years was bright in a way that seems almost impossible now. Wild, stripped of restraint and judgement. T.A.T.u. and such on every channel. Permission to be and dream, to be queer in a way the culture that later was made criminal.

What followed is known. The place I grew up in became something else. Rot creeping into everything. Orchids everywhere yet freedom and essential beauty lost.

I still carry the original orchid in my mind. It recurs across my work and holds too many things to abandon the subject. Like the first encounter with that promise and the knowledge of what the promise became. The body that moved through both. I draw them, I handbuild them from porcelain. My training was in textiles, that is still how I approach surface and form: the petal handled the way cloth is handled, drape, edge. In many of my series the orchids surround other arrangements and ritualize them, a ceremony. I carry my hope and this essence of freedom with me.