Echoing Roots

For the Latvian designer Baiba Soma, making has always been entangled with remembering. Her latest work takes as its subject the traditional straw ornaments of her homeland — intricate geometric sculptures suspended from ceilings during winter as talismans of harmony and protection, woven anew each year while the previous one was consigned to flame. The practice is ancient, pagan in its roots, and quietly vanishing.

Distance, Soma has come to understand, sharpens one's attachment to the things left behind. By rendering the traditional construction in glass — transparent, brittle, luminous — she finds in the substitution an argument: cultural inheritance is beautiful precisely because it is precarious.

The centerpiece here — seven hundred and seventy interwoven glass tubes assembled into a suspended light object — flickers and refracts with every shift of air and viewer. To stand beneath it is to experience something on the threshold of recollection: simultaneously present and irrecoverably far away.