South Parade – Siggi Sekira: Parties to cover the silence

Known for her work with ceramics and coloured pencil drawings; they create the shared ground of her interior and external world. This creative space draws on her childhood, Ukrainian mythology, the 1900 Wiener Werkstatte movement (Vienna Workshop), Soviet avant-garde, and the spread of Western pop-culture after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When she was a child her grandfather, a merchant seaman, used to give her flax and say it was the hair of mermaids, like Undine or Lilly, that he had met when crossing the equator. The blackened Grief Wreath, due to multiple firings, suggests the wreaths commonly worn by young women during Ivana Kupala night, a pre-christian slavic festival to celebrate the summer solstice.