Kíra Krász
Kíra Krász was born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1995. She currently lives in Hungary and is studying for a Masters Degree in Fine Art at the Hungarian University of Fine Art, in Budapest. She graduated in BA (Hons) Photography from the University of Brighton(UK) in 2019, winning the Photoworks award for her final project, Thought after Taught. Since then her works have been exhibited in various countries across Europe. In 2021 she received a scholarship for her ongoing project, From Marble to Stone. Her work was presented at Hangar for the exhibition In the Shadow of Trees in 2022 and her series A Living Sense of Home won the Leica Coup de Coeur prize.
Her work focuses on the interaction between images and their physical properties. She explores the possibilities of photography, experimenting in printing techniques, overlaying images, textures and installation. Her aim is to achieve a state of “timelessness” in terms of creating images, whether by selecting old photographs, papers that have been aged, working with traditional techniques in a darkroom, or by using inkjet and printing with incompatible materials.
Artist Statement
Forests furnish the earth. Trees furnish forests. I furnish trees.
For most people home is the place they can go to find peace and relief. Their home is shared with their beloved ones, and they furnish it to their heart’s wishes. Their flats and houses are their little treasury boxes, their bedrooms are where they collect memories from the past, and protect the valuables of the future. In my series, A Living sense of Home I am looking for parallels between the architecture of our homes and the structure of trees. I am interested in the associated feelings and atmospheres that they resemble in our lives.
Thousands of years ago – people made their homes in caves and forests. They gathered their nutrition from trees, not imagining that the Oxygen that they were breathing partially originated from the same source. In many religious traditions trees obtained great symbolic significance, Pagans, for example, prayed at sites that contained the tallest trees, whereas, in Christianity the bible begins with the apple tree of knowledge; the first lesson of good and evil. Willow trees, elder flowers, and lindens were associated with medicine and believed to provide medicine for some illnesses.
Wood, as a material, is used as a source of heat in the winter, and forms the standing structure of houses today. So dependent are we that we even farm trees, they are grown and nurtured for the specific purpose of being cut them down and manufactured on mass. The interiors in this project were found in books dating back to as early as the 1910’s, when furniture was made with the highest craftsmanship and designed to last for a century.
This project is calling for your inner child to join me in imagining all rooms of a tree house. I am offering a glimpse inside, the habitation of aristocratic insects, communities of royal birds, jade colored lichen and fungi, bats and owls under the bark. Trees provide shelter and protection to all, they don’t ask for anything in return. They are only giving.
New Green Tiles, 2024
Release Date: November 1, 2024
New Green Tiles, 2024 is part of my A Living Sense of Home series, that I am working on since 2021. The project focuses on life inside trees, that we cannot see. Insects, bugs and little creatures that do an important job but they are not directly visible to human eyes.
The interior images in this series were carefully selected, either to create an interesting atmosphere or a new meaning. When I found this photo of roofers on a house at my local flea market, I immediately knew it would be part of this series. The tree, I photographed in Normandy (France) had half of it’s top section missing, being dried out so montaging some roof-repair into it seemed to be the matching idea. I printed the original photograph on the back of an old wallpaper I found there, so it gained some nice yellow shades to go with the photograph from the 1940’s.