Plaster, varnish, wood, metal

40 x 65 cm

Edition of 4

Lemons that Sing Stories (2021) explores the relationship between object, memory, and poetic association. At the center of the work is a single glossy plaster lemon, removed from its original context and transformed into an almost surreal presence. The work originates from a poem about lemons that began singing the stories of birds once kept in small cages inside a lemon tree. The birds no longer exist, yet traces of their presence remain. The lemon tree belongs to the artist’s grandfather in Makarska, Croatia. Reduced to a silent sculptural form, the lemon becomes a vessel for absence and remembrance. Its porous surface suggests something no longer audible yet still present, a residual voice embedded within the object itself.

Alongside the lemon, a mandarin and a blueberry extend this chain of fragmented memory into a wider constellation of fruit as carriers of scaled emotional distance. The mandarin, with its segmented interior, suggests a layered structure of recollection, memories that can be separated, shared, and reassembled without ever fully returning to their original whole. The blueberry, by contrast, condenses memory into near opacity, small, dense, and almost cosmic in its dark surface, it evokes the compression of stories that are no longer articulated but felt as intensity. Together, the three fruits form a quiet system of translation between presence and disappearance. They do not restore what has been lost, but circulate it across different scales of intimacy, from the expansive memory of the lemon tree, to the relational interior of the mandarin, to the almost impenetrable singularity of the blueberry. In this constellation, fruit becomes a fragile archive in which memory is not preserved as fact, but as shifting resonance.