Xenia Busalova

Every night, when the day is gone, I make one matchstick from porcelain. Those matchsticks, like temporal fractals, appear ceaselessly, one a day, composing the mathematical sequence by an append-only method. I fire raw porcelain in the kiln, assign the dates and keep those turned-to-stone matches in dated matchboxes. Though the date itself says nothing, only numbers, it unfolds when there is a story, an interplay between the subjectivity of that day and our cultural understanding. It is my daily ritual and commitment to represent the irreversibility of time in physical matter, signalled in every day I live. The fundamental venture of this collection is to translate real time into a physical dimension, to grasp the pure conjunction of passing time and expose the intangibility of time into an absolute tangible presence – to measure passing time in spatiotemporal units. Every day is closer to the last, and almost everything – fears, failures, expectations, etc. – falls away in the face of finitude, leaving only what is important.