A Journey to Nowhere
Being an immigrant is a strange, in-between feeling. I no longer feel fully at home in the place I come from—but in the country where I now live, I am not yet home either. I exist in a liminal space: between languages, between landscapes, between ideas of belonging.
In this work, I return to the image of the snail—a creature that carries its home wherever it goes. I find comfort in that metaphor. Like the snail, I carry pieces of my home with me, but they are not always visible. They are embedded in memory, in objects, in rituals.
One of my earliest memories is of the glass-fronted cabinet in my grandmother’s apartment. Inside stood a pristine tea set—too precious to be used, always waiting for a “special occasion” that never came. This collecting of beautiful things, untouched and protected, was a quiet inheritance from the Soviet past, when scarcity made people gather and preserve what they could.
For me, collecting objects is like collecting memories. Unlike photographs, which flatten time into images, an object holds the weight of emotion. I often find myself in charity shops, stumbling upon the exact same tea set from my childhood. Once a symbol of status, now it sits dusty and forgotten on a discount shelf. Yet every time I see it, I am transported back—to the old post-Soviet apartment with the carpet on the wall, the warm July sun streaming through the window, my grandmother cooking porridge in the kitchen.
Since leaving my home country at 18, I’ve moved across five different cities in the UK. Each time, I looked not just for shelter, but for a feeling of home—that sense of warmth and rootedness I remembered from my childhood. But as time passed, I began to wonder: have I forgotten what “home” feels like? Are memories enough? Or do I need to build that feeling again, piece by piece, collecting new objects, new rituals, and new memories as carefully as placing porcelain behind glass?
This work is a meditation on memory, repair, and the search for belonging.
It is a home—not fixed in place, but assembled in parts.
To buy a snail visit:
https://kristinaharitonova.com/shop
