"Silent" is a portrait of my grandmother who perished in a Stalinist-Soviet prison. The egg in my grandmother’s hands is her silent hope that her children will survive. Oil on tablecloth and a teatowel. W63"X H84"
OLGA HIIVA
Artist Statement
Born in the Soviet Union into an Ingrian-Finnish and Russian-Jewish family, I find that there are several layers to my immigrant story-experiences that are pivotal to my work. Like most of us, I navigate multiple planes of identity.
I paint in oil on tablecloths, bedspreads, and garments. My work is large in scale, from 6ft to 12ft, and is hung as a tapestry, without a frame and directly on the wall. I stretch, unfold, and discover what may be hidden in a fold of a cloth. Objects woven, embroidered, and sewn long ago are painted to reveal a pattern, onto which a portrait or a figure is superimposed. I call my painting process “slow painting” because it may take me a year or more to complete a work. The “Iconoportrait” series I am currently working on is inspired by my Ingrian-Finnish lineage. “Silent” is a portrait of my grandmother who perished in a Stalinist-Soviet prison, leaving only the hope that her small children will survive. “Shekhina” depicts a young woman holding an egg, a symbol of fertility and of mourning; of hope and choice.
A tablecloth, as I see it, is a receptacle for tears, shouts, blessings, and curses—a canvas for emotion. A nightgown, an apron—once cared for, now abandoned. What remains is the memory of a vanished story, of silence, and of hope. These pieces weave together threads of generational family trauma—a history of arrests, deportations, and killings. When contemplating the concepts that come up in my art—female dependence and independence, beauty, violence, and vulnerability—I consider these questions: what does it mean to be abandoned by your country? How does strife shape the generations that follow it? How do we preserve the emotions of the past?
Past Group Exhibitions: Structures of Feeling, 2022