Talking to Ghosts – Artwork
Wool, Acrylic Paint, Leaf Gold, Metal, Bones. 180 × 100 cm, 2024.
A flag raised for the Siberian Ice Maiden. We bow to her—not out of nostalgia, but recognition.
Talking to Ghosts is dedicated to the Siberian “Ice Maiden”: a Pazyryk woman found preserved in the permanent frost of the Altai, her skin carrying animals and battle-forms—leopards, stag, rooster, and a mythic lion-eagle—tattoos so precise they still read as expertise across 2,500 years.
Our flag is not a portrait. It is a meeting device.
A needle-felted head hangs like a soft idol—face as threshold, mouth as sealed doorway. Gold leaf follows the grammar of her tattoos, not to “decorate” her, but to let her marks become signal again: the body’s language translated into light. Real horse bones fasten the fabric like ritual hardware—steppe matter, ancestor matter—so the banner cannot pretend to be innocent cloth. It is burdened. It is sworn.
We dedicate this work to her because she can talk to ghosts in ways we cannot imitate. From her side of time, she witnesses us thousands of years later—our noise, our speed, our worship of images. From our side, we witness her reaching back through the frost: not as a museum object, but as a voice preserved by climate, an emissary delivered by cold. The permafrost becomes a medium, a long séance held in the ground.
We bow to her—not out of nostalgia, but recognition. The tattoos are not “ornament”; they are training, commitment, and authority. A powerful woman, spiritually charged—shaman, priestess, something adjacent to both—whose signs survived the afterlife they were never meant for, and arrived in ours anyway.
