OLGA HIIVA
Artist Statement
I paint on tablecloths, bedspreads and garments. The process by which I arrive at my paintings is like an archeological dig. Before I start painting, I look for patterns woven, embroidered, or sown long ago, and I let those patterns guide my work. I place a human figure or portrait into a large manmade or natural landscape. In my work, a tablecloth or bedspread plays as much of a role as a forest or a desert. In this balance of the concrete and ethereal, the viewer is encouraged to make space for inner meditation.
The "Iconoportrait" series is inspired by my Ingrian-Finnish lineage and explores my culture’s history of violence and genocide. I draw my imagery and ideas from overlapping cultures and languages. I was born in the former Soviet Union into an Ingrian-Finnish and Russian-Jewish family. Ingrian Finns are indigenous to the St. Petersburg area, and were persecuted in Soviet Russia. The Ingrians in my family, my mother and her relatives, were evacuated to Finland by the Nazis during World War II. Most Finns were deceptively lured back to Soviet Russia, then imprisoned or sent to work camps. There were some 160,000 Ingrians in Russia before the war. Now, there are fewer than 20,000. The Ingrian genocide is on the cusp of being forgotten, but my mother’s story lives on in me and my work.
I have spent the past three decades weaving threads of this generational trauma into my paintings— a history of arrests, deportations and killings that continued deep into the Soviet era. When so much felt desolate, and when money and even food was hard to come by, my mother’s family turned to embroidery, weaving and sewing for survival. A tablecloth was so much more than a square of linen. It was a receptacle for tears, shouts, blessings, and curses—a canvas for emotion. These stitchings were passed down to me and my children. They still hold feelings from years past. What is revealed or hidden in the folds of cloth? These heirlooms inspired me to look for hidden stories in old nightgowns, shirts, skirts, and bedspreads and paint them into life.
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