Baba Jaga entered my ceramic work as more than a story. She became a way of understanding clay, age, marks, fire, and transformation.
In the old tales, Baba Jaga lives at the edge of the forest. She is not simple. She is frightening and wise, destructive and helpful, wild and deeply knowing. She belongs to the threshold — the place where the familiar world ends and the unknown begins. Whoever enters her world must face tasks, uncertainty, fear, and truth.
For me, Baba Jaga became connected to individuation: the slow process of becoming more fully oneself. She reminds me that transformation does not always come through softness or beauty. Sometimes it comes through difficulty, ageing, loss, fire, and the courage to meet what is hidden.
This is how my Baba Jaga ceramic technique developed.
I began to move away from polished surfaces and perfect finishes. I wanted the clay to look as if it had lived. I wanted the vessel to carry memory. I wanted the surface to show marks, pressure, stain, touch, and time.
My vessels are handbuilt. They are formed slowly by the hand, not by machine. The surface is worked with texture, symbols, scratches, impressions, slip, oxide, and natural earthy tones. I often leave areas unglazed or only partly glazed, because I want the rawness of the clay to remain visible. The clay must still feel close to earth, body, bone, ash, skin, and memory.
The marks are important. A spiral may suggest return and inner movement. A tree may speak of roots and growth. A house may hold the longing for safety. A vessel may become a body, a container, a memory, or a self. These symbols are not decoration only. They are part of the language of the work.
The Baba Jaga technique is therefore not only a ceramic surface. It is a symbolic process. It allows the clay to become aged, weathered, imperfect, and alive. It honours what time leaves behind.
In this way, each vessel becomes a small threshold: between earth and fire, beauty and roughness, memory and transformation, the known and the unknown.
This is the spirit behind my exhibition, What Time Leaves Behind.
Clay remembers.
Every vessel carries a story.
Time leaves marks.
Clay gives them form.
Rina 💕