Aleisa Miksad

In ways that are reflective rather than macabre, Aleisa Miksad's body of ceramic work 'Elysian Fields' 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, while inherently fragile, 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 Familiar ceramic forms remain as silhouettes, yet their functions are withdrawn; vessels become reliquaries, and pelts become shrouds.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. Faces appear partially submerged, neither fully present nor absent, echoing the intermediary nature of souls in the posthumous habitation of the Elysian Fields.