There are just five days left to see our new porcelain work, Stella Dreams of Marsi, at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga. It’s part of the exhibition Journey to Marsi. The Artist Enters a Wooded Meadow (Ceļojums uz Marsiem. Mākslinieks ienāk parkveida pļavā), which closes on Sunday, 15 November.
Despite the name, nobody went to the red planet. Marsi is a farmstead in Valka municipality, in northern Latvia. Its meadow is one of the oldest and most remarkable wooded meadows in the country, and the same family has looked after it for generations. The farm is named after the current owner’s grandfather, an amateur astronomer.
Wooded meadows, also called park meadows, are an old Latvian landscape. Large, ancient trees stand far apart, with open grassland between them. Centuries of hay mowing and grazing shaped them, and in places a single square metre holds more than 50 plant species. Farming has changed, though, and only about 1,400 hectares of these meadows are left in Latvia. To get more people to notice them, the Latvian Nature Fund teamed up with photographer Kristaps Kalns and artist Sarmīte Māliņa. In 2025 and 2026 they invited eight Latvian artists and artist groups to visit the meadows in different seasons. Kalns photographed each visit, and his large-format photographs hang alongside each artist’s response to the trip, made in their own medium.
When the invitation reached us, we set off for Marsi with our dogs, of course. It was late summer: the last flowers were in bloom, the second hay was nearly ready to cut, the cows were still out to pasture, and the meadow was at its fullest.
That night, Stella, one of our English setters, dreamed about Marsi until morning, restless and excited, full of the cows she had met there. Stella Dreams of Marsi grew out of that dream.
In Stella’s Marsi, the cows stand with all four feet on the ground, while naked women float across the sky like clouds. From her porcelain dream world, Stella watches, curious and a little uneasy, as the familiar world turns wonderfully strange.
Perhaps each of us experiences the same landscape differently. We see the beauty of the meadow; Stella sees the cows. And somewhere between those two ways of looking, imagination takes flight.
We’re very happy to be showing alongside artists Ieva Iltnere and Jānis Mitrēvics, sculptor Aigars Bikše and artist Jana Briķe, poet Jānis Rokpelnis, composer Krists Auznieks and artist Krista Vindberga-Auzniece, artist Andris Eglītis, actor Vilis Daudziņš, and the band Alejas. Our thanks go to the Latvian Nature Fund, Kristaps Kalns and Sarmīte Māliņa for inviting us on this journey.
Photos: Kristaps Kalns