In childhood, adults used to say: "If you eat everything, you’ll see the picture on the plate." Nowadays, very few people stick to the Sunday dinner tradition, when festive dinnerware is taken out of the cupboard. During the weekdays, this very dinnerware is normally displayed as a family treasure.
In my work, I continue to delve into the kitchen topic as a manifestation of the matter certain sides of which always remain in the shadows within Christian culture, either because of their dirtiness and obscenity or because of their sacredness.
I created a series of images and lined them up in a certain sequence, taking into account both the parity of large and small plates and the parity of reality split into "low" and "high". In such a way, I perceive a weekly re-enactment of the ritual of festive food consumption as a historical ancestral landscape, where each solemn place is marked by an appropriate image*. One should bear in mind such a place can be both an elevation spot and a shell hole (as sacred and ignominious as the pubis (sic!)). It is not by chance that in Ukrainian, the Frontal Place, the Place of the Skull sounds similar to a Pubic Place – Lobne Mistse).
Every ritual action, usually mechanically performed, is a bodily reminder. That is why I chose plates with the famous golden rim, designed and adapted for eating, not for use as a decoration or, God forbid, as an art object.
*Images on the plates: photos taken by me in the kitchen of a pathetic restaurant in Kaniv (Ukraine), in the meat department of the Rye Market in Kyiv, in the Johann Georg Pinsel Museum of Sculpture, and in the National Museum of Lviv. I also used copies of illustration fragments taken from my grandmother's cookbook "Polish Kitchen" (1957).
Vlada Ralko
