Olga Hiiva

Artist Statement

I paint on tablecloths, bedspreads, and garments—textiles that already carry a history before I ever touch them. My process is closer to archaeology than composition: before I start painting, I search out the patterns someone once wove, embroidered, or sewed into the cloth, and I let those patterns guide the work.
Into these found landscapes I place a human figure or portrait, set against a vast manmade or natural expanse. I think of the result as a kind of Reductive Surrealism—a few familiar signs allowed to collide. Somewhere in that balance between the concrete and the ethereal, the viewer is asked to respond intuitively: to recognize the mystery in an image of motherhood, in an article of clothing, or in a religious symbol, and to find, in that recognition, a space for meditation.
A tablecloth or a bedspread has always been a receptacle for tears, shouts, blessings, and curses. My work begins by trying to listen to what's already there.
When contemplating the concepts that come up in my art—female dependence and independence, beauty, violence, and vulnerability—I return to a few questions: What does it mean to be abandoned by your country? How does strife shape the generations that follow it? How do we preserve the emotions of the past?
I draw my imagery and ideas from overlapping cultures and languages. I was born in the former Soviet Union into an Ingrian-Finnish and Russian-Jewish family. Ingrian Finns are indigenous to the St. Petersburg area and were persecuted many times throughout Russian history. The Ingrian genocide is on the cusp of being forgotten, but my mother's story lives on in me and my work. I have spent the past three decades weaving together the threads of this generational trauma—a history of arrests, deportations, and killings that continued deep into the Soviet era and persists now, into Putin's rule.
When I draw on my Finnish roots, I think of cloth and of what is revealed or hidden in its folds. When so much felt desolate, and when money and even food were hard to come by, my mother's family turned to embroidery and sewing for survival, comfort, and—when possible—joy. These stitchings were passed down to me. They still hold feelings from years past, and they inspire me to search for the hidden stories in old nightgowns, tablecloths, embroidered tea towels, and bedspreads and to paint them into life.