Interview between artist Marie Lukáčová and curator Veronika Čechová about the exhibition “Boiling Conscience, Marinating Thoughts”

    What is your favourite recipe, Marie?

My favourite recipe is the one I inherited from my aunt. Recipes in general have been in my family for generations. Not the traditional Czech dumplings and sirloin steak, but rather recipes on how to add herbs to a dish and what time of year to cook them. My aunt has a wonderful recipe for broth. I drew the Sabbath drawing based on it. It’s such a health and energy bomb that you can only make in March/April. My aunt has moved to a cabin deep in the woods and this spring time we are all out of energy from the long winter. So every year, one Sunday afternoon, the whole family gets together at my aunt’s place in the woods. She serves broth there, classic beef broth, but instead of boiling the broth in water for two days, she makes it in birch water that she bottles directly from the birch trees. A meal like this will give you energy for a few cold weeks before the warmer days come.

     Do you like to cook for yourself or mainly for others?

I can’t cook for myself. When I’m home alone, I order food from an app. I like to cook for my son, my partner or visitors. I like sharing food, but I like preparing it even more. The transfer of energy from one thing to another when the flavors and power that was in a crop or animal gets into one another and then ends up in the human body. (I see this last point as unfair, but it’s also essential to me. To work with the suffering and pain I am causing someone/ something else by my consumption.)

     And what about art, would you say you create it more for your own sake, or for whoever sees/ hears/ experiences it?

I try to think of the audience as much as possible, but there are things I cannot change. In the series of drawings that is on display at wanda gallery, I present my favorite recipes. Broth, Szeged goulash, apple and mushroom salad, cherries with flowers… They are visualized recipes. They are also composed in circles – on plates or round tables where there is no hierarchy. At the round dining table we have at our home, no one has a permanent place, our chairs are always going around and around, and I always sit in a different place at dinner than I did at breakfast.
Also, the circle can’t hurt you (pierce or impale you). The shape can also represent eyes, or rather portholes through which you can look inside of something.

     How often do you marinate your thoughts?

Lately, all the time. I have my beautiful studio, but I calculate that it takes me 30 minutes to get there and 30 minutes back. I don’t usually have this much time during the day, so I use it as a showroom and draw mainly at home in my kitchen. I’ve created quite an interesting space in it in the time I’ve been doing it that way. There are spices, vegetables, bones for broth and lots of crayons with post production and animation techniques side by side. That space is very important to me. It allows me to take care of my son and work in a focused way as well. But there is always the possibility of soup splashing onto the drawing or into the computer keyboard. It hasn’t happened yet, but I do like that certain level of tension.

     Do you think that art somehow reflects the collective human conscience of the time in which it is created?

Of course it does, it incorporates current social and technical developments. This is then reflected both in the ideas that go into the art and in the technologies that are used to create it. I do most of my production on the computer (animation, film post-production, etc.) but when I draw, I realize quite clearly that the evolution of the production of crayons, papers, markers or a simple tape allows me to do things that were impossible to create twenty years ago (or at least not as easily as today).

     Can the same energy pass through the image of the broth to the one who perceives it as when the real soup – the broth – is eaten?

Well, the energy from food usually comes right away. The energy from the image is released gradually and fills the whole space that it is placed in – but this perception is maybe a bit ezoteric : )