2024
Steel, steel cable, ceramics, self developed red mud glaze, Ukrainian red mud
Dimensions : 600 × 240 cm / 35x35 cm (variable)

This project investigates resistance—of bodies, materials, and nations—through a series of clay sculptures made from red mud, a toxic industrial byproduct collected from the Mykolaiv Alumina Refinery (Миколаївський глиноземний завод). Once a site of massive extraction and processing, the plant was established under Russian business interests and has now ceased operations due to the war. Its closure is both a rupture and a symbolic release—a moment when exploited land, stripped of agency, begins to reclaim itself.
Ukraine has never truly existed outside of tension. The struggle for sovereignty has always been entangled with external powers, and its industrial legacy carries the scars of this imbalance. Red mud, a hazardous residue from alumina production, becomes here both a literal and symbolic material: heavy with past contamination, resistant to use, and politically charged.
Through months of experimentation, the red mud was reconstituted into clay—transformed from inert waste into something malleable and alive. Sculptures shaped from this clay draw on the form of egg-shaped electrical insulators, objects designed to hold tension, prevent discharge, and resist breakdown. Hung from taut steel wires, the works become suspended moments of latent energy: at once fragile and resilient.
The installation evokes a field of charged stillness—each piece a body under pressure, each wire a line of invisible force. The sculptures do not rest; they hover. They resist collapse not through stability, but through constant balance, echoing the conditions of a country caught between histories, caught between powers.
In a time when even the earth has become a political actor, Tension Field asks: what is the weight of resistance? What forces shape us when the infrastructure fails? And how does a material remember what it was made to endure?