The Happy Pig

The Happy Pig belongs to the Stories series made of three-dimensional mixed-media works on vintage Bohemian crystal trays where personal history, ecological urgency, and the quiet language of objects converge.

At the centre of this piece stands a small rubber piglet: an antique toy, found in a Prague market, its expression open and joyful, almost cartoonishly innocent. It looks up with wide eyes, unaware. Around it, the resin spreads in deep crimson and magenta, the colour of blood, flooding the surface of the tray in every direction. The contrast is immediate and impossible to ignore.

This is the tension the work holds without resolving: the happiness of the animal, and the reality of what awaits it. The pig does not know. It stands in the middle of what we have made: the industrial food system, the factory farms, the conditions that most people prefer not to picture when they sit down to eat. It looks up, curious and alive.

The vintage Bohemian crystal tray, found in the same Prague market as the figurine, is deeply engraved with intricate cut-glass patterns. Beneath the red resin, its geometry still glimmers like a layer of beauty underneath a layer of violence, much like the packaging that makes what happens inside invisible.

The Happy Pig is not a comfortable work. It is not meant to be. But it holds the discomfort lightly like in a small, round, smiling figure that deserves a happy life.