Several Pieces of a Matryoshka Doll
This larger project – which encompasses many small, interconnected projects – is an investigation of a personal and familial history of loss, mental illness, and obscured cultural heritage. In 2016, at the age of 54, my mother Wanda Marie Wright (née Michalyshyn) died of a rare type of brain cancer — a personal tragedy that is both singular in its impact on my life, but is also of a piece with several generations of struggle in my family with physical and mental illness.
Using photographs of my Ukrainian/Polish immigrant family from my late mother’s collection as points of reference, the project uses interdisciplinary practices — from sculpture to photography to installation — as a way of entering the material reality of my mother’s life and querying traditional domesticity and its impact on both mental illness and ancestral identity.
“May This Cookbook Be a Precious Resource for Us and for Future Generations”
My mother left to me various family ephemera, including spiral-bound cookbooks that were published during the mid-to-late-20th century in Ukrainian communities in Manitoba, where she was born. The books once belonged to my grandmother, and were passed down to the women in my family. These books are a portal into a middle-class Ukrainian diaspora – they represent the ways in which the women in my family, including my mother, attempted to hold on to their Ukrainian heritage and translate it into the context of mid-and-late 20th century Manitoba. That they were then passed on to me is significant in itself; with little real connection to my Ukrainian ancestors, these cookbooks are virtually all I have as an indication of where my family originated from and how they might have lived their lives.
Inspired by these cookbooks, as well as family photographs of table settings and holiday dinners, this series of sculptural works include ceramics, textiles, and ready-made objects. From traditional Pyrohy to Kolach (braided bread), the sculptures represent the types of food that my second-generation immigrant family might have made for a traditional Ukrainian Christmas dinner as a way of holding onto their Polish/Ukrainian heritage. Many of the traditional dishes in the pages of these books are practically sculpture in their own right; in their decorative, symbolic, and even ritualistic nature, these labour-intensive foodstuffs are a form of folk art just as much as a source of nourishment.
This project has been funded by a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation grant in 2024.
“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 some of the more well documented occasions.
This portion of the Matryoshka Doll project is an homage to my grandmother, my aunts, and all the other women in my family who were always there to bake a cake for whatever celebration was happening.
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, as well as cakes created in the 90s and early 2000s during my own childhood.
Making a clay cake is much like making a real one, except it’s not at all. Dirty hands and piped edges, a fake cake is not meant to be eaten but rather looked at and considered for its symbolic nature – tireless, repetitive domestic work, the aesthetic joys of sugar, baking as a form of play, how age can serve to shrink and harden. A cake made of clay is eternal, the way a photograph is – the cake is forever perfect, its icing looped and swirled just so, the candle burning bright.
The sculptures created for this part of the project are intended to reflect and replicate the baking work done by the women in my family, and are a playful nod to aesthetic changes of taste over the years.
A portion of “Eat Your Cake” was published in Babbles: 003 Mealtime in February 2024.
“The Ukrainian Outfit”
Published in Armarolla V: On Love (2020)
