Lena Wolek grew up in the wartimes of Siberia, Russia. She and her family had little money to spend on food and resources, but always rye flour bread, the cheapest bread available at the time and the most nutritious and necessary for survival.
This need for survival through bread is realized most recently in her School of Art gallery, “Help yourself.” The piece consists of over 60 colorful ceramic desserts spread out messily on a large white table, resembling an “Alice in Wonderland” tea party fit for all. In the center of the table sits a large high heel made out of the same rye flour bread Wolek ate as a child.
The piece is meant to symbolize the contrast between necessary and unnecessary, from the vibrant and inedible desserts to the overshadowing, plain bread in the middle.
“It’s a necessary thing in life, every culture has bread,” Wolek said. “There are times when there are no food and bread is the first thing you eat. In wartimes bread is what people need, they don’t need sweets. I like that tension between the basic and the added superficial luxuries in life.”
Wolek took extra steps in her art to make the desserts seem all the more luxurious. The cakes, ice creams, fruits and cookies were piled high and decorated with bright paints and gold tips. The fourth year fine arts sculpture major got inspiration for the piece from Damien Hirst’s “For the love of God,” a ceramic skull covered with platinum, diamonds and real human teeth. She wanted to create something that was so obviously extravagant that it would force people to notice the nonessential element to the pieces.
“I wanted to make them look as alive as possible but at the same time it looks like they’re falling apart, almost like a collapsing of civilization,” Wolek said. “They’re not perfect, they’re on their way to decline…They’re shiny but they’ve already started to fall. They’re not good for us.”
Wolek took three months to perfect the imperfectly messy dessert dishes, creating over 100 different variations of the eccentric pieces. She wanted the ceramic glaze to look like popular sugary treats and used baking products to create realistic frosting and designs on the pastries, saying she noticed a “nice parallel” between ceramics and baking throughout the project.
The giant bread high heel however, Wolek made in one day, experimenting with the dough and pottery wheel for a few minutes before placing the shoe in the oven. Her first attempt is the one that made it onto the table, drooping down in the middle of the shoe and filling the small white room with the smell of baked bread.
“The high heel is another unnecessary thing we added to our lives that is really beautiful and elegant but at the same time you’re very vulnerable and unstable,” Wolek said. “We’re facing these choices everyday. We overuse things, we don’t use our resources right and we’re exhausting our planet because of greed. We constantly get seduced because of something that we want, that same desire like when we want dessert.”
Wolek said she plans to have a fully edible shoe as a centerpiece for her next show so guests can cut off a slice as they wander through the gallery, and hopefully be reminded of the consistency and reliability of bread. This would also tie in the shoe to the message more closely, as people feast their eyes on the beautiful ceramic desserts that are unable to satisfy them and must settle for the more nutritious and filling plain bread. This drives her point home, in addition to her artist’s statement, that people can never be satisfied with what they have.
Her statement read, “There is never enough space in our bellies to fit all we drool for. There are never enough shovels to remove all we pile on our plates. There is never enough saliva to digest all we throw into our hungry hole. There are never enough sewer pipes to transfer it away from our sight…There is never enough love. There is never enough dough.”
Wolek’s gallery, “Help yourself” will be on display through from noon to 5 p.m. through Thursday, with extended hours until 7 p.m. on Wednesday.