Happy Family Dinner

One of the strongest ways of remembering a family is to remember the table around which it gathered. A dining table is not simply a place where people eat. It is an everyday space where shared time, habits, small arguments, silences, and repeated behaviours gradually accumulate. Over time, every family develops, often without noticing, its own particular arrangement around the table.

Happy Family Dinner begins with this familiar setting. The series consists of seven painted ceramic plates, each representing a different character within a family. These characters, however, are not portraits of specific people. They emerge instead from the behaviours we encounter repeatedly within family life, the small gestures that remain in our childhood memories, and the habits that gradually become attached to particular people.

Someone always arriving late to the table, someone lingering over the food left on their plate, a child inventing one excuse after another to escape the meal — such ordinary moments often occupy a surprisingly large place in family memory. Years later, what remains with us is sometimes not what was said, but these small behaviours. The series looks at the way such everyday details become characters within memory.

The choice of ceramic plates is equally deliberate. A plate is an entirely ordinary object, directly connected to food and everyday life. Yet it has also long been produced not only for use, but for display. Once hung on a wall, the decorative plate is removed from its everyday function and becomes associated with ideas of home, family, and order.

Happy Family Dinner brings these two meanings together. The plate remains an object belonging to the table, while the figures on its surface transform it into something else. On a familiar and orderly surface associated with family life, characters emerge that are difficult to fully define and, at times, slightly uncanny. Warmth and unease, belonging and individuality occupy the same surface.

Seen together, the seven plates form something larger than the individual characters. Each suggests a distinct personality, yet their meanings are completed through their relationships with one another. A family, after all, is not simply made up of individuals. It is shaped by the ways they respond to one another, the roles they assume, and the patterns of relationship that continue, even as they change over the years.

For this reason, I think of the seven figures less as members of a particular family than as different states within the idea of family itself. Together, they form something familiar. Yet within that familiarity, each one retains a certain distance, strangeness, and solitude.

For me, Happy Family Dinner takes shape around this contradiction: between the closeness of being together and the distance that comes with being an individual; between the family we remember and the family we actually lived; between the warmth of people gathered around a table and the small disturbances concealed within that image.

Perhaps this is what keeps family memory alive. Not the moments when everything was perfect, but the small, strange, ordinary scenes that remain with us long after everything else has faded.