Completely unknowable, yet eternally present, is the ubiquitous mystery of the afterlife. Since time immemorial, death has dominated the human imagination, unfolding across history, art, culture, ritual, and storytelling – a reminder of the transience of our physical being, infused with equal parts dread and splendour. In Greek mythology, the Asphodel Meadows and the Elysian Fields exist as manifestations of death, space, and place; heterotopias of the afterlife in which time is suspended and existence is quiet and unresolved. Ancient writers paradoxically describe these mythic landscapes as fertile and fragrant, or ghostly and ash-coloured, revealing a complex and often contradictory understanding of life after death.

In ways that are reflective rather than macabre, Aleisa Miksad’s latest body of ceramic work draws on symbols of death and burial as repositories of collective memory, endurance, suspension, and metaphysical space, particularly the imagery of funerary immortelles – everlasting wreaths and porcelain flowers placed on graves, often protected beneath glass domes. Popular during the
Victorian era, immortelles were created as permanent alternatives to fresh flowers, their survival a result of material endurance rather than renewal or replacement. Like the Asphodel Meadows and the Elysian Fields, they exist in a liminal space; floral yet artificial, fragile yet intended to outlast the bodies they
commemorate, separated by millennia yet bound in their shared symbolic task of imagining continuity after death. At times, the condensed atmosphere beneath the glass dome, combined with porcelain effigies and devotional objects, allows new life to emerge in the form of lichen or moss, filling the vessel and creating the outward appearance of transformation.

Porcelain carries the exhibition’s central contradiction. While inherently fragile, it endures across centuries. Familiar ceramic forms remain as silhouettes, yet their functions are withdrawn; vessels become reliquaries, and pelts become shrouds. Across vessels, wall-mounted reliefs, and stitched porcelain ‘pelts’,
Miksad builds dense surfaces of hand-formed growth. Ruffles, floral motifs, and hair-like protrusions accumulate around faces and fragments of portraiture, suggesting both botanical abundance and bodily protection. What appears tender is also defensive, and what suggests tactility is rendered untouchable. Faces appear partially submerged, neither fully present nor absent, echoing the posthumous habitation of souls in the Elysian Fields.