Cold Iconic Series - Divine mg & Interior (Redacted))

Cold Iconic is a series of sculptural works that examine how systems of meaning - religious, domestic, technological, and institutional; are ritualized, displaced, or hollowed out. Using salvaged furniture and domestic artifacts, the series explores the emotional and symbolic residue left behind when these systems collapse or are absorbed into contemporary forms of control. Each piece combines found material with hand embroidery, and subtle sculptural intervention. Cross-stitch embroidery is employed not decoratively, but as a form of analog research. As a historically gendered, domestic, and often undervalued craft, cross-stitch has long operated as a medium of resistance—used by women and marginalized communities to encode grief, protest, and memory into the fabric of everyday life. In the context of this series, it functions as an act of prosecting the mutation of systems. The objects are chosen for their embedded intimacy: a kneeler, a cabinet door, a cradle, a plate. They are not restored, but reactivated, transformed into quiet containers of disrupted ritual, failed care, and fragmented memory. The work resists spectacle. It invites slow engagement and silent recognition. In Divine mg, a porcelain plate bears a single slice of commercial toast, onto which three Xanax pills have been embroidered in fine, cross-stitch. The work directly references the Eucharist, replacing the sacrament with pharmaceutical sedation. A ritual healing displaced by chemical compliance. The gesture is neither ironic nor sentimental. It marks a shift in how the soul is soothed, and by what mechanisms. Interior (Redacted) transforms a detached cabinet door into an archive of vanished intimacy. Ghostlike outlines of once-held domestic items are stitched into the fabric on the panel, like memories that have faded past recovery. The handle has been replaced with an absence. The piece becomes a monument to protective forgetting: an act of erasure not out of neglect, but survival. What is concealed here is not hidden maliciously, it is sealed with care. Across the series, tensions between care and control, presence and absence, visibility and erasure remain central. Cold Iconic asks what persists in objects when function is gone, when belief has been digitized, when memory is too heavy to carry. The works propose no solution. They offer instead a slow form of inquiry - through ritual, through repair, through trace.

Artist

Anastasia Solodov

MEDIUM

Mixed media sculpture, bread, resin, embroidery; Mixed media sculpture, wood, metal frames, embroidery

Year

2025

dimensions

200 x 20 x 420 mm 710 x 35 x 520 mm

The Black Shop

11 Caledonian Road

London N1 9DX

Visit Our

Parallel Site at Space House

2025 ® Wedge

The Black Shop

11 Caledonian Road

London N1 9DX

Visit Our

Parallel Site at Space House

2025 ® Wedge

The Black Shop

11 Caledonian Road

London N1 9DX

Visit Our

Parallel Site at Space House

2025 ® Wedge