Salve Regina Souvenir (2011) – Bread, Memory, and Devotion

Salve Regina Souvenir is a series of sculptures made from bread, a material that in the artist’s creations carries both domestic and symbolic significance. Unlike earlier works in which bread was offered and consumed—such as Dedications—here the material is preserved. Encased in plexiglass vitrines with black bases, the sculptures assume the format of contemporary reliquaries.

The titles—Izanami, Nut, Loreley, Shekina—reference female mythological and spiritual figures associated with fertility, transformation, and protection. Through bread as a primary and universal substance, these archetypes are translated into tangible forms. The organic material is removed from its usual ephemeral cycle and stabilized an object.

The series holds particular biographical resonance. It was produced for an exhibition in Shanghai in the year of the death of the artist’s father. For him, bread was a profession and daily practice; for her, it becomes artistic language. The material thus operates as a site of continuity and separation.

The title also refers to a formative auditory memory. In Einsiedeln, where the artist was born, Benedictine monks traditionally sang the Salve Regina during Vespers. This liturgical reference informs the work’s devotional structure, though reframed in a personal and non-liturgical context. The term “souvenir” functions not as an ornament but as a marker of passage—between geographies, between memory and ritual.

In this series, bread is repositioned as relic, archive, and symbolic body, articulating intersections of mythology, biography, and spiritual reference.