A palm-sized raft balances on a plinth of similar form and materiality. Delicately etched are thread-like lines – ocean currents that flow between North America and Europe. The raft and its plinth are reconstructed with each installation, impermanent. 

The series – a carrier raft — directly references Ursula Leguin’s 1986 essay, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’. The essay proposes an antithesis to the hero-led narratives defined by clear-cut conflicts and resolutions: “We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with…but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained.”

A raft is built out of necessity, urgency, carrying life. a carrier raft (I) makes strange of the familiar, its original form made from found sticks (paradoxicaly) in Toronto, its clarity revealing threads contained within, the prominent red reminiscent of the balkan kilim. A kilim, flat like a raft, bears the weight of life, sometimes of generations. This one brings two identities together –  one embedded deeply, like a fossil.

Le Guin, Ursula K. Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. S.L.: Ignota Books, 1986.

Sofia, Zoë. “Container Technologies.” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (May 2000): 181–201. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2000.tb00322.x.