Urn Practices

Daryn Wright is a writer and artist based in Vancouver, BC. Her work involves the reproduction and re-enactment of archival material, through the use of photography, painting, sculptural reconstructions, miniatures, dioramas, foodstuffs, and dress.

Several Pieces from a Matryoshka Doll:

This project is an investigation of a personal and familial history of loss, mental illness, and obscured cultural heritage. Using ancestral photographs from my late mother’s collection as points of reference, the project comprises many different forms, from clay work to photography to miniatures, as a way of entering the material reality of my mother’s life and querying the creation of handicrafts in traditional domesticity.

Eat Your Cake

Among my family’s photos, there are an overwhelming number featuring cakes. This makes sense, as family events and celebrations featuring cakes, like birthdays, graduations, and weddings, would have been well documented. My grandmother, Rose Michalyshyn (née Zatylny) was likely the baker of, if not all, then most of these cakes. The cakes are almost all the same size and shape, suggesting the same cake pans were used year after year, and they are all distinguished by their fluffy, white icing and minimal decoration beyond the use of candles.

My mother often talked about my grandmother – or my baba, as we called her – in a way that made it sound like she probably didn’t really want to be a mother. It would have been rare for women in the 40s, 50s, and even 60s to remain single and childless, especially in a small, Catholic community like Oakburn, and it’s likely my baba followed the traditional role of woman out of obligation and a lack of alternatives. In other words, she took on the role of domestic housewife out of momentum more than by choice. The baking of these cakes represents, to me, her domestic obligations: to care, cook for, and uphold the ideals of the nuclear family. That she was not a particularly affectionate mother – according to my mom – hints at the way she may have begrudgingly taken on the role of mother.

These photos show my mother and her birthday cakes over the years, from her first birthday in 1962, to her as a teenager in the 1970s. In the early 90s, my aunt – who, with my uncle, rented the first floor of the house that we were also tenants of – worked as a baker and pastry chef, often bringing home sweets to share with the family. My mother herself didn’t enjoy baking, and usually bought my birthday cakes from a store or, I imagine, asked my aunt to make them for me.

These are generations of cakes made by generations of women, within the context of the various roles they assumed, chosen and not.

A page from the Ukrainian Daughters’ Cookbook, compiled by the Ukrainian Women’s Association of Canada, Daughters of Ukraine Branch, Regina, Saskatchewan.

This book was part of my maternal grandmother’s collection of locally published cookbooks that later belonged to my mother and her siblings.

Easy Bake

These cakes were handbuilt with natural air dry clay during the COVID-19 pandemic. Molded, dried, then painted with acrylic, these falsified cake slices are intended to replicate the domestic labour of the women in my family. As a celebratory dessert that required much effort and groceries, the cakes were only baked for special occasions, like birthdays. An immigrant family like my own, and like so many others, would have had little means for extravagances like cakes, and yet they made them anyways. These fake cakes were “baked” not for celebratory purposes, but rather the opposite — as a reminder of the monotonous and cyclical tasks that women undertake in the domestice sphere.

These clay cakes were also created during a time of extreme duress, when a global pandemic forced us all to stay inside our homes for the health and safety of others. Extended periods at home led to an increase in bread making and other “Victorian era” hobbies, like pressing flowers, using natural dyes, and regrowing vegetables on window sills. As a result, grocery store shelves were freqently empty of baking essentials, like flour and yeast. One can only imagine that the baking of a cake in this circumstance, real or not, signaled a sort of resistence against the bleak reality we were all enduring — we would bake cakes and celebrate nothing at all other than the fact that we were still here.

The Ukrainian Outfit

Publication forthcoming in Armarolla, Summer 2020 issue.

The Hallowe'en Costume

This note was written to my mom from my grandma. It’s uncanny to me how similar their handwriting was. The note says:

“Hi!

Didn’t take long to make the custom [sic] but I haven’t been sewing for so long that I had to think a lot. Some material left over so I may make her a dress or something. Shows for elastic at the wrist but it may be nice as is. I do want a picture of Daryn in it and I hope it fits okay. The treats are for everyone. Hope Daryn has fun on Halloween. Colleen said you got angel wings for her.

We have some great weather here right now. Sending the snaps & you can keep them – sharing with Colleen.

All is well.

Love Mom.”