LIHNIDA KRSTANOSKA-BLAZESKA

This is not my home, this is just where I live’ explores themes around memory, identity, mythology, and culture. Working with textiles and ceramics, I create illustrative forms which draw on my experience of growing up in Australia as a second-generation immigrant. The narrative is one which holds feelings of nostalgia, contemplation, joy, and loss.

The figures featured in the works are derived from Macedonian folklore, they are re-imagined as hybrid creatures merged with everyday family scenes to highlight this tension between familiarity and strangeness. There is a sense of closeness and comfort, but also a sense of distance, existing between places, identities, and ways of understanding the world. Between two homes, and between the real and the imagined.

Soft textile forms are met with glazed ceramic surfaces reflecting this duality. The works bring together fragments of childhood, cultural experience and storytelling with scenes of family life, the gardens, the animals, and the everyday routine in my grandparents’ home. Stepping into this space brings me back to their home, the whispers of the village, the real and imagined creatures, a place with flowers blooming and food cooking.