How to Root in Unstable Ground

Part of group exhibition UNBOUNDED WITHIN – SYMBIOTIC SUBJECTIVITIES. Curator Elo Liiv.

This installation continues long engagement with bog, material memory, and embodied presence, now through the question of dwelling at the edge of wetland. After moving from the city to a farmstead in Lahemaa, the artist’s initial desire to settle and cultivate slowly gave way to another kind of attention. The land appeared as a living field of thresholds: wetness, mold, collapse, animal traces, old timber, bones, roots, and peat. Here the bog is not a motif, but a condition through which belonging, instability, preservation, and transformation are understood.

At the centre lie blocks of peat from Lavassaare, an extracted material carrying both ecological violence and deep time. Upon this unstable ground rest farm logs from the artist’s home terrain, wrapped and formed in cuir bouilli leather in Hinge Points. Around them, leather portraits, ceramic bodies glazed with ash from the artist’s forest, a stained-glass roe deer, and a cast-glass weasel unfold a meditation on shelter, kinship, hunting, care, and taking.

The installation asks what it means to build family life, artistic life, and material practice in a place already thick with prior bodies, uses, and losses. Leather, peat, ash, glass, wood, and image each register a different afterlife of contact. Together they form a provisional home: one that does not claim the ground as stable possession, but enters into relation with what was already there. To root here is to accept that every dwelling rests on negotiation—with land, with matter, with memory, and with more-than-human lives.