MA SHOW
Rita Veres,
the House is the Body, the Body is my Home. 2025
Charred pine, rusted mild-steel, castor wheels, carraway seeds, human hair, Transylvanian horsehair, red-satin ribbons, etched glass, silk-paj, hard-ground etching embossments on soft-white cotton paper.
Dimensions variable
I approached the Summer Show as a station, a testing out of ways of presentations as part of a longer learning process in my developing practice. I selected works that I considered most successful from Unit 2 and early Unit 3, and applied them to craft an evocative installation. For me, the most important learning points came from accidental encounters, as well as feedback and conversations during install and the group crit with peers, tutors and technicians. These dialogues became essential in showing me how might I develop my work further.
One of my key discoveries was the charred pine wooden panels. I had planned to cover the wall with hay and mud, but peers noted the interest of the panels themselves. Burning them brought forward a voice almost independent of me: an animal-skin quality, velvety, fragile, and deeply sensory. This accident showed me the importance of letting materials speak in their own language, with the charred wood activating imagination through senses. Viewers remarked that they could almost smell the sweat of a horse simply by looking at the surface.
I also began experimenting with the corner as a point of convergence, a kind of embracing outline that transfigured the cubic architecture of the room into something more rounded: a ceremonial space, enveloping the body of the viewer as they moved along. This layout handed over the choice of encounter, allowing each person to navigate, shift between distance and closeness, and trace the movement of their eyes as their body progressed through the layers of the work.
At the same time, not all conditions supported the work. The whiteness of the room and the bright lighting flattened the installation, draining atmosphere and muting its sensory qualities. As suggested, future considerations include experimenting with dimmer or suspended lighting, or covering the wall entirely with charred tiles. I am also interested in introducing repetitions of the title as spoken language, and subtle sounds (braiding or handling seeds) that remain understated yet active, carrying the potential to generate new meanings within the work.
The Summer Show proved invaluable as an experiment, a reminder that the element of craft in my work lies also in the exhibition-making itself. I orchestrate and transfigure organic, humble, often invisible elements (olfactory, imagined, remembered, felt), and the show revealed how much a physical exhibition matters, and is where my choices have impact. The scent of seeds, the thickness of the paper, the surface of charred pine are all hardly documentable or non-documentable elements, and the exhibition confirmed their significance for my explorations. For me, showing work publicly is not an endpoint, but a generative testing ground where accidents, materials, memory, movement, time, space, location, dialogue, and viewers’ readings all shape what the work may become.
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