Maryna Sakowska - Digging up

The work Digging up was created as part of the _SOON project in the space of the Starak Family Foundation. It is a site- and time-specific installation consisting of a seven-meter-long fabric that is cut to resemble a garden pergola or lattice, on which hang paintings, leaves and flowers cut out of the fabric, and garlands made of chicken bones. Woven into the fabric pergola are shoots of ivy, which grows beneath the panel on which the installation is mounted. The piece is inspired by the winter gardens inside the Foundation's building, as well as the time it was presented - around the Day of the Dead and Halloween. Part of the work is also the text, which was available to visitors as a description.

In Autumn, we do the digging in our garden. We find bones of the previous generations, which shrank like a sweater in the wash. We use them for creating sophisticated necklaces for trees and flowers. Earthworms envy them. Creeping, they try to gain something. Then, disconsolate, they depart deep underground, towards the Jurassic strata.

Their slimy creep inside the Earth crust arouses hardly noticeable tectonic tremors, which cause the tree branches to move bashfully. Poorly attached leaves fall to the ground. We rake them, count them, and segregate them into those reusable and those non-reusable. We pin the former ones again to the branches at a regular spacing. We impale the latter ones on long sticks and roast them on a tyre campfire.

text: Maryna Sakowska

DIGGING UP, site specific installation: fabric, acrylics, chicken bones, paintings on checkboard tablecloath, pins, artificial branch, ivy (real), thread, 3x7 m, 2020, Project _SOON, Spectra Art Space, Starak Family Foundation, Warsaw, 2020

TO GO OFF ONESELF TO GET BACK, oil on checkboard tablecloath, frill, chicken bone, 70x50 cm, 2020, Project _SOON, Spectra Art Space, Starak Family Foundation, Warsaw, 2020

untitled/Curtain, acrylics on checkboard tablecloath, 65x45, 2020, Project _SOON, Spectra Art Space, Starak Family Foundation, Warsaw, 2020

死 (Death), oil on checkboard tablecloath, chicken bones, 35x27 cm, 2020, Project _SOON, Spectra Art Space, Starak Family Foundation, Warsaw, 2020

untitled, 20x27 cm, oil and acrylics on checkboard tablecloth, frill, 2020, Project _SOON, Spectra Art Space, Starak Family Foundation, Warsaw, 2020