Timea Tihanyi

 MEMORY MEMORIAL

The current era of climate emergency combined with the ongoing pandemic has forced many of us to radically rethink our relationship to objects and Nature, rewriting our own roles as makers and consumers. How we exist without and within boundaries, including the space between virtual and physical, inside and outside, living and dead, and what it means to be with, to cope, adapt, survive, and thrive needs to be reconsidered with urgency. 

Surrounded by scarcity during an authoritarian political regime, I grew up making things. Do-It-Yourself was a way to gain independence and exercise my rebellion and self-definition. 

The material world that surrounded us in the Eastern Block was cobbled together from hand-me-downs, which became tokens of history and memory, and took on a new life as the narratives that circulated through them. The labor of making by hand, the tenderness with which the soil is tended, bodies are touched, and textiles are mended are both in my family and my ethnic heritage. 

The ceramic process itself is carework and blue-collar physical labor. While I now mostly work with technological tools such as 3D printers, scanners, software, and code, I still use my hands extensively. 

My work unfolds as an autobiography of sorts. It incorporates digitally-altered bits of Hungarian folklore: cross-stitch embroidery patterns, hand gestures from a popular fin-de-siècle operetta Csárdáskirálynő (The Csárdás Princess), and wallpapered and tiled interiors of panel block apartments. It also honors generations of women who toiled with big bales of cloth on factory floors, who wove, embroidered, washed and ironed linen, and mended it, constantly saving it for one more generation. Porcelain is both the context and the object: billowing, folding, slumping, and tumbling in its impatient containment like crisp starched sheets, while unseen hands prod it on, tearing down and building up, reshaping, and holding contained the world around it.