There is a photograph in Ella Costache’s Seeded that stops you cold. Red carnations, massed together in a dense, sculptural bouquet, glow against absolute black – lit with the kind of drama usually reserved for couture on a runway or a Caravaggio altarpiece. A strand of glossy red beads curls around them, snaking upward into the darkness. The whole thing pulses. It looks, simultaneously, like a sacred offering and a high-fashion still life, like something pulled from a grandmother’s kitchen garden and reborn in the pages of a magazine.
Costache, who is Bucharest-born and London-trained, completing a Masters in Fashion Photography at UAL, has spent her career working at the restless intersection of fashion image-making and cultural inquiry. Her earlier practice turned hair into medium, braiding questions of womanhood, body, and intimacy into works both eerie and tender. Seeded marks a shift into the subject of home, the specific, sensory, tactile memory of the Balkan everyday.
The works themselves are sculptural still lifes created in collaboration with Bucharest floral studio Nocturn Flowers. Corn, cabbage, grapes, seeds – the fundamental vocabulary of Romanian agricultural life – are arranged with the same obsessive precision a stylist might bring to a shoot for a luxury fragrance campaign. Then Costache photographs them: low light, deep shadows, theatrical contrast, the visual language is unambiguously fashion, the subject matter, on the other hand, is decidedly not.
Western representations of Eastern Europe carry a long, tiring freight of clichés, Romanian identity in particular gets flattened, routinely, into Dracula, poverty, and melancholy. Seeded refuses all of it. The agricultural produce she shoots is, in its Romanian context, associated with labour and simplicity, things that are plentiful, unglamorous, taken for granted. Yet transport those same objects westward and they transform: the artisanal vegetable, the natural wine, the seasonal eating, the farmstead cultivation, an entire lexicon of Western aspirational consumption has been built around the very things that Balkan families have always simply grown and eaten. A jar of homemade pickled cabbage becomes, in certain London postcodes, an object of considerable cultural currency. The same cabbage, in the village it came from, is just dinner.
Costache became fascinated by this slippage: the way meaning is not fixed in the object itself but in the economic and cultural systems that surround it. Running underneath all of this is something warmer and more personal: the Romanian concept of belșug. Plenitude. Overflow. Richness not in the financial sense but in the sensory, domestic one, the table that is always too full, the garden that is always producing more than you can use, the summer that smells of tomatoes and cut grass and something sweet fermenting somewhere nearby.
Seeded will not be the last time an artist makes work about migration and homesickness, but few manage to locate that ache so precisely in something as specific and unsentimental as a grain of corn. The carnations in the dark are still glowing. Something in them refuses to be ordinary.
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