Lera
Kotsyuba

Curatorial Musings

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    In the time of a global pandemic, with shelter-in-place orders that sought to protect people from one another, a lapsed consideration was that the home is not always a place of safety. Looking at the physical space around us, considering its history and legacy beyond shelter but as a means of colonial and patriarchal power, and the impact on the body in reaction to that space. Kathy Kranias’ ceramics evoke the body in her vessel forms, in gesture and the physical act of making her hand-built sculptures. Her practice draws upon her Greek heritage through myth and classical vessels to confront the colonial legacy of her British heritage and the cycle of domestic violence through her matrilineal line. Matrilineal Hauntings serves as a confrontation with dark family histories, and as a means of working through trauma in gesture and making to work towards healing. In occupying 43 Queen’s Park Crescent East, the house built for her great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Cooper Mason, Kranias works through the revenant of domestic violence in her matrilineal line and confronts the colonial and patriarchal power dynamics through labour and gesture in her vessels, occupying the space not in an installation but a forceful imposition of her presence in the space to subvert the power dynamics of the interior. Kranias’ vessels are dynamic and transformative, always on the threshold of growing outwards or taking flight, transforming themselves from their surroundings, aspiring towards freedom. 

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- Lera Kotsyuba, Curator    

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