Deities of The Second Shift blends together sacred and profane forms of ritual to highlight their repetitive and prescribed nature that often yields no permanent material results. I used ordinary tin antique baking forms and photographed them in a way that their representation became reminiscent of some sort of sacred totemic objects. The resulting photographs, printed directly to aluminium, bring out the marks and scuffs on the forms’ surface as testaments to their repetitive use, often spanning several family generations. “The haptically interesting surfaces scarred by these minute imperfections and scratches are a reminder of all the hands that repeatedly touched them.”* I also produced hundreds of plaster casts made from the same forms that are meant to resemble votive objects that worshipers place in holy places to seek grace or wishes. At the same time, they also evoke the entirely profane, repetitive, and laborious process of baking the small biscuits, which exist for a disproportionately short amount of time – mostly female labour closely bound to the other homemaking rituals, in this case connected with Christmas or Easter.

The other photographs, such as the staged still-life where everything is covered with kitschy nylon curtains, often found in central European interiors, represents both a church altar as well as a claustrophobic and obsessive attempt at creating a homely and cosy atmosphere. The series mixes seemingly playful repetitive ‘making’ with something sinister that underpins the ceaseless cycles of female labour, the so-called second shift, that often comes unacknowledged – a Sisyphus task that any mother will recognize. Home, aftercall, is the centre of one’s universe, as the last photograph, the found image from the 50’s cookbook of a finger pointing to a hole in a dough, cheekily called Omphalos (the Greek word for mythological navel of the world), reminds us.