Ivana Poliakova

Approach to ceramics

Poliakova first encountered ceramics six years ago while living in Korea, and ever since she has been learning and working on establishing her own project "Sercetvir". Her practice focuses on cultural and historical research into the continuity of ceramic tradition, and how both materials and decorative motives carry symbology and meaning.

She works with the themes of memory and identity, as she traces how forms migrate from one culture to another, carrying meaning and evolving while remaining recognizable.

"I like to perceive clay as a physical carrier of memory," she explains.

Her research-based approach had taken shape in "Fragile Coast", a project focused on the history and continuity of the use of local clay. Without any technical support, she spent six months experimenting with wild clay and studying archaeological research on local clay artifacts to understand how to make the material plastic and stable.

"At some point I started to think of myself as a medium for the clay, rather than the other way around. It pushed me to understand the material on a much deeper level," Ivana says.

For Ivana, making ceramics is both an intellectual and a physical experience:

"My favourite part is probably the stage of creating the idea, the active intellectual process of forming it, and also the state of meditative flow you reach while working manually on big pieces."

Inspired by Ukrainian decorative traditions

Her work also draws from Ukrainian decorative tradition: floral motifs, the tree of life, hearts, crosses - all patterns found on household objects, painted on houses, and embroidered onto clothing.

"There's a trace of magical thinking in the belief that like attracts like: if you surround yourself with symbols of gardens, fertility, and beauty, you might invite abundance into your life."

Behind the ornamentation hides a deeper motivation:

"I'm very much inspired by things made with an intention, by that glimpse of hope I find in an intentional act of creating," the artist shares.

Clay as a carrier of memory

Clay, for Poliakova, is a material with its own history.

"It carries a long history of use and holds its own narratives and traces. It contains artifacts that are relevant to many different time periods. I believe that working with such materials can help mediate a connection between our past and present, and potentially open a path toward the future."

The vine, twice over

Ivana spent her first weeks in Salemi with her attention on façades, doorframes and balconies, where the vine turns up again and again as a decorative motif. The image was not new to her. She grew up in southern Ukraine, where vines are trained over arched frames in courtyards and gardens, and the shade they throw is where people sit, eat and talk through the worst of the afternoon. Two ornamental traditions with no direct link between them had settled on the same plant, and in both places the vine stood for shelter as much as for decoration. That coincidence became the research question she worked on for the rest of the residency.

“There’s a trace of magical thinking in the belief that like attracts like: if you surround yourself with symbols of gardens, fertility, and beauty, you might invite abundance into your life.” — Ivana Poliakova, May 2026

The panel

The mural is a ceramic panel assembled from tiles that were each formed, carved and glazed by hand, then fitted together on the wall. The composition falls as a cascade of arches, and the ornament that fills them is modelled in relief rather than painted, so the vines hold their own shadow and the surface changes as the sun moves across it. The arches do not sit in a neat grid. They overlap and descend, closer to the way a vine actually grows over a frame than to the way a pattern repeats.

A wall people already use

The building at Via Salvo 9 was a home until the 1968 earthquake brought it down. It was rebuilt afterwards as a public space, and it stays in daily use. Ivana was clear from early on that she did not want a wall that would become a destination. She wanted one that people already pass, lean against and meet in front of, so that the work would be seen by the same people many times over rather than once by visitors.

An architecture for a feeling

The arch does two things at once here. It is a structure that holds up a building, and it is also the shape a memory takes when you return to it — the place you go back to in your head when something soft comes to mind. The mural pushes that shape out into a street, and offers shade as an emotional condition rather than only a physical one. It builds shelter for a feeling, which is not usually a thing a wall is asked to do.