Child (working title)
Vera Ryklova
For this project I perform to the camera while creatively engaged with other subjects.
Inspired by the absence of my own child from my life, this project explores a sense of motherhood and is pursued in collaboration with other woman - the real mother - and her own child.
The work is executed at my subject’s home and the intention is that I, through experimentation, experience a superficial sense of motherhood. So far I have worked with 4 women, constantly developing the concept, and the examples here represents the different approaches I allude to. Series Anna-7-years, Jasmin-9-years and Ema-16-years were created through a play: I was dressed in the clothes of their mothers following the daughters’ choice who also did my make-up and my hairstyle. The key element in the images is the dress that we both, I and the mother, wore, as it connotes the mother’s identity I borrowed and signifies my loss at the same time. In Anna’s and Jasmin’s cases I took control over taking all photographs, whereas Ema was invited to direct me how to pose for my self-portraits. The series Johana-12-years was created by observing her loving relationship with her mother. In this case I shared the control over the creative process with my subjects to make them active agents of the execution. I allowed them to instruct us on what will be performed and then how it will be captured by triggering the shutter release. The body language, the expression, the position within the given space is the child’s and mother’s conscious performance.
This project is as a long-term commitment as prior to such collaboration a relationship with the subject has to be established.
_2017_Child-WIP_web.jpeg)
Vera Ryklova is a Dublin based artist, working in lens-based media. Currently undertaking MA in Art and Research Collaboration (2021) at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire, she graduated from the same Institute in 2015, with a BA (Hons) in Photography.
Ryklova presented her first solo exhibition in 2018 at Triskel Arts Centre in Cork (IRL). Her work has been also featured in a number of group exhibitions held in Republic of Ireland as well as in UK, including the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallery in Dublin, the Ulster Museum in Belfast (NI/UK), and the FiLiA feminist conference in London and Manchester (UK). She was shortlisted for the Hennessy Portrait Prize in 2016, which exhibited at the National Gallery of Ireland, and she is the winner of the 2017 Hotron Art Works Prize for work by a recent graduate.
Her work was also reviewed in the photographic magazine Source under Source Graduate Photography 2015, and is included in the Art Collection of Trinity College Dublin.
In her practice Ryklova explores both the social construction of the self and the self-concept. Through the medium of her own body and using her own – subjective – experience she intimates a woman’s reality to the public eye while concerning her socially formed traits.
Performing to the camera she produces series of photographic and video self-portraits that reveals an emotional conflict driven by role expectations and embedded social practices.
The creative approach she has developed gives the camera the function of a distancing device that she utilises for her to experience a state of catharsis. She links the execution with the liberating emotional discharge. Making her work serves as a coping strategy, this adds an extremely personal aspect to her practice, but still touches on universal human experiences.
Ryklova’s activities are also engaged in curatorial practice. As a curator she presented two group exhibitions in Dublin, in 2015 at Steam Box Galleries and in 2017 at The Complex.
Originally from the Czech Republic, Ryklova was brought to Ireland on a journey of personal discovery and since 2007 she has been living and working there.
Optimal Distance
Inspired by what it has been for me to live abroad, the work explores a sense of belonging and looks at themes of identity transformation and culture perception.
I initiated this project after living almost ten years in Ireland to confront my longing for feeling at home in one place that maintains my mind free of concern. On a journey of personal discovery, purely motivated by a desire for a life change, I left my home for new. But the shifts in psychological sets challenge my sense of unity and breed a sense of displacement. I have been left with a grief-like emotion.
The key attitude to my confrontation is to gain an access to inhabited places where I perform while letting myself be inspired by as well as using their original interior designs to claim each place to be my home. This creates an illusion that fixes my grieving mind. The physical spaces I occupy connote the process of seeking a resolution to the loss (of a sense of belonging). My body is where the conflicted experience is homed and where the shift in perception is manifested, it is where the emotional and social transition takes place as foreign is accepted for domestic.