Fragile

by Liza Chernova

35 pages

Description

As a teenager, I first realized that after death, all my memories would disappear forever. I was lying on the upper berth of a sleeper train from Siberia to Moscow, unable to fall asleep. I watched through the window as endless rows of apartment blocks – like anthills – rushed past across vast, snow-covered landscapes, and I could almost feel the lives unfolding in the few glowing windows.

Everything I felt in that moment, the way I saw the world, seemed like the most important part of me. Beautiful, painful, deeply personal. The very thing that made me who I am – something intimate and essential. And yet it exists only as long as I exist.

I started drawing and writing more, leaving messages in library books. I wanted to create as many traces of my presence as possible. I was afraid.

That fear has softened over time. But the desire to share my perception of what has passed remains. I realized it might be possible to do this through the things that surround me. For me, they are part of my past. By using them in my work, by combining them, I try to convey traces of that time.

Another important theme for me became reflecting on how time affects things, and what happens to them when they lose their function. Through objects, I can track time and observe how it transforms them. Signs of wear, cracks, discoloration – these are not flaws, but their biography. Material objects do not simply decay; they “remember” touches, movements, and events, acquiring a unique history. An object without scratches, rust, or cracks has lived through nothing. The value of the objects I use lies not in their preservation, but in what has happened to them.

I observe how use changes matter, how function fades while presence accumulates. Some objects have lost their function entirely. Here you will find worn and faded clothing labels, barcodes and manuals for broken devices, fragments of diaries, bent paper clips, book pages, buttons, logos of places I used to love, dried acrylic paint, medical prescriptions, pill blisters, rust, torn plastic bags, tickets, tea bags, snakeskin, currency from countries I have traveled to, used bandages and plasters, and much more.

Behind all of this are pain, tears, joy, disappointment, doubt, love.

My work is an attempt to see an object not as a thing, but as a process, not as a form, but as a trace of life – and to convey the time I have lived through material objects.

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