JEPH GURECKA
Bread, Salt, Water
FUTURA GALLERY
PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

For the past ten years I have been working on the “still-life” series. A rather open ended pursuit of humanistic symbols and their material relationships.

The materials used in my sculptures, change constantly depending on what material is suitable to fulfill the idea of the project. Through all of my investigations, I study the personality, process and significance of a material until it is a host for the idea and not just a copy or representation. I experiment with many types of processes; many of these incorporate the use of craft. In doing this, it gives me the mobility to explore different techniques, and work with unique materials. It is important for me to use a material that not only enmeshes with the idea, but one that also exemplifies the complexity of the idea. The material always has to be personal and unique to me.

Collecting is another important part of my process, gathering the common image or artifact from nature and re-presenting it back to the viewer in a new way speaks about the personal symbol that is engrained in my memory either from childhood or from present cultural influences. Ultimately, I feel that these still-lifes are intrinsically human and speak about transience and mortality, my greatest curiosity and motivation.

Most recently, I have been working with the idea of the sustenance of life: bread, salt and water. It is my desire to explore these basic fundamental elements as mediums for sculpture, to work with them as a symbolic metaphor as well as experimenting with their physical properties.

Symbolically, bread, salt and water have social, religious, economic and humanistic significance. As material, bread has an amazing organic process that I attempt to shape, but ultimately that shapes itself. The level of humidity, ingredients, care and concentration given, determines how the material will respond. In many ways, it is like a chemistry experiment.

These materials historically have an integral meaning to life and culture, and illustrate the fundamental elements of existence, something that is continuously overlooked in contemporary western culture. These simple common ingredients found in our homes have the power to bring people together and have been used by both church and state.

I have been making castings of anatomically correct skulls baked in bread based on the „vanita“, common in still-life genre paintings.

A wall of skulls will be a continuation of the „vanita“ series inspired from the bone ossuary in Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic, and only six kilometers from Castle Trebesice, where the production was actualized. The duration of the production was 5 months at the castle – from May-October 2004. This skull tableau will be both a contemporary response and homage to the remarkable bone ossuary of Kutna Hora. This installation will first be exhibited at FUTURA gallery in May 2005. After the gallery show, the skulls will be returned to the castle and be permanently installed on the grounds.