Sekretiki
2025 –

Sekretiki were made by children, in secret, in the ground. Small arrangements of photographs, drawings, found objects, built into a hollow and covered with a piece of broken glass and soil. Later, part of the glass would be wiped clean, the mud forming a natural frame around whatever was inside. Looked at briefly. Covered again. Known only to the maker.

Voy learned the practice in the region where she grew up as one of the Finno-Ugric peoples (like Karelians, Ingrians, Veps, and Ingrian Finns among them) who shared languages, oral traditions, and ways of living rooted in the same forests and lakes for centuries. Political pressure, Russification, rural depopulation, and the frequent removal of any formal status from local languages left these communities without the conditions for continuity. Growing up inside that landscape, and then leaving it, gave Voy a particular homesickness of someone formed by a place that was already disappearing. The Sekretiki series is, in part, a response to that: an attempt to be in relation to the better parts of an inheritance that has no clean edges.

The first stage of the series takes the form of porcelain containers holding layered compositions: soil, images, found objects, organic materials that continue to change after the work is complete. Things built to be partially seen and partially withheld.

The installations include living elements, planted vegetation that continues to develop through the exhibition. This requires tending. The desired outcome is not guaranteed. What grows here grows on top of something that was buried: it honors the memory underneath while softening it, the way growth does to ruins. Given enough time, something new covered by vegetation begins to resemble something ancient. The series is planned to expand beyond the gallery into wilder and less controlled territory.

The Sekretiki sculptures are surrounded by porcelain orchids. Unlike the modest vegetation that would have framed the original Sekretiki in the ground, the orchid is cultivated, ornamental, associated with rarity and display. Here it adds an extra layer of ritual to the works. The orchids echo gestures of remembrance, the laying of flowers. The curvature of the orchid form recurs across Voy's practice as a whole, with approach rooted in her textile training and the way it shaped how she handles porcelain surface and form, and it carries a larger personal narrative.

Remembering here is about reclaiming what was lost and about accepting what cannot be recovered. Each work is a monument in a way: a place to put something down carefully, a mark of presence made by someone who was once, like everyone, a child.

The first installment of the Sekretiki series was presented in March 2026 at a group show at Oksasenkatu 11, Helsinki.