Nina Hofstetter

Red Items consists of three ceramic objects — a mirror, a pair of earrings, and a candle holder — developed for the exhibition Women and Other Monsters as elements of a speculative “monster living room.”

The works examine the domestic interior as a psychological and ideological space. Traditionally coded as feminine, the living room becomes here a site of tension: a place where ornament shifts from decoration to disturbance, and where the familiar begins to tilt toward the uncanny.

Formed in clay and saturated in red, the objects oscillate between seduction and threat. The mirror reflects but destabilizes; the earrings frame the body while implying transformation; the candle holder suggests ritual rather than comfort. Red functions not merely as color but as signal — of exposure, vulnerability, intensity, and latent violence.

The “monster” in this context is not a creature but a condition: a body or identity that exceeds containment. By slightly altering scale, proportion, and surface, the pieces inhabit a threshold state — neither purely functional nor entirely symbolic. They resist stable categorization.

In relation to my broader practice, Red Items continues the exploration of suspended belonging and unstable orientation. The interior becomes a metaphor for identity itself: constructed, staged, and yet never fully secure. The objects appear settled in space, but conceptually they remain in movement — oscillating between protection and exposure, intimacy and estrangement.