Ruslana Hahan builds jointed, plant-shaped creatures out of ceramics, 3D printing and handmade paper — porcelain mermaids, orchids with roots for legs, flowers that seem to look back at you. She'd rather talk about the pleasure of solving a puzzle she invented herself than about any deep meaning her work is supposed to carry.
Ruslana Hahan is a ceramicist, doll-maker, PhD candidate and lecturer at the Lviv National Academy of Arts, in the department of ceramics. She takes part in exhibitions, competitions and residencies mainly with jointed ceramic sculptural works, and also works with 3D modeling and 3D printing.
Her current project is a doctoral art project, within which she creates jointed objects and dolls with a plant-like appearance. In the work, she combines ceramics, 3D printing, handmade paper and other materials, depending on which technical solution a given object calls for. Alongside this, she continues her own creative practice, takes part in exhibitions, competitions and residencies, and teaches. A separate strand of her work has been introducing 3D modeling and 3D printing at the Department of Artistic Ceramics at the Lviv National Academy of Arts — she considers it important that students have access not only to traditional ceramic techniques but also to contemporary tools that expand what the material can do and make more structurally complex ideas possible to realize. She also helps students work with jointed systems, having seen strong interest among them in movable sculpture and artistic dolls.
In this feature, what she most wanted to talk about is an artist's right not to invent deep "meanings" where none arose naturally alongside the work. Sometimes, she says, a picture can simply be a picture, and a thing simply a thing — beautiful, strange, complex, funny, or technically interesting. That doesn't make it any less valuable. She feels close to an art that doesn't have to begin with some grand statement, but can start from a simple "I want to make this." Most of her works came into being exactly that way: an idée fixe appears first, and it's only afterward that it gradually becomes more complicated through engineering challenges.
"A picture can simply be a picture, and a thing simply a thing — beautiful, strange, complex, funny, or technically interesting. That doesn't make it any less valuable."
Once she already knows how to build a particular construction, she says, she becomes curious to add more joints, change the scale, use a different material, or make the object move in a way she hasn't tried before. Repeating a solution she's already found bores her quickly, so every new work becomes, in its own way, a problem she's invented for herself to solve — and it's the process of solving that problem, she suspects, that brings her the most satisfaction.
Many people, she notes, enjoy putting together puzzles or building sets. She essentially designs a very niche construction set for herself first — inventing its parts, its rules and its problems — and then tries to assemble it. Sometimes the result is a porcelain mermaid; sometimes an orchid with roots instead of legs; sometimes a flower that looks back at the viewer with curiosity. Meaning may arise alongside the work, in the process of making it or in its interaction with a viewer — or it may not. What matters to her is leaving room in art for play, curiosity, experiment, and the simple pleasure of watching a strange idea that once existed only in her head finally take on flesh.
More of her work can be found on Instagram @ga.ga.ru.ru.