Réka Ritt Laklia

Deep Wisdom is a painting connected to the Water element, a natural resource that best reflects human consciousness.

Built from four connecting panels, Deep Wisdom features thousands of copper triangles arranged into small booklets on its surface. These booklets, with their mysterious warm glow, represent the wisdom of the subconscious. They symbolise the many stories, old and new. They have sunk to the bottom, and while some remain forgotten and buried, others are ready to be rediscovered and lovingly brought up to the surface in a constant flow, creating a current that offers a deep mental and emotional reset.

There is an undulating rhythm that originates from this wisdom; a rhythm of learning and unlearning, creating and surrendering, trusting the unknown and remembering. There is a rhythm, a wholehearted one, to which we can tune our bodies, minds, and spirits. And, wholehearted we are when we embrace all the shades of our experience, the dark and the light; when we dare to invite all our exiled parts to join the celebration.

So dear growing family of boundary walkers, I wish you a wholehearted deep dive into life, a true-blue connectedness to the rhythm of Medicine Festival, creating the path together by our rhythms, ripples and stories, like the many rivers and currents that join in the depth of the ocean.

'Deep Wisdom' was commissioned by Discovery Networks in 2015.

Réka Ritt Laklia is a Hungarian visual artist based in London. She received a doctorate in Law and Political Sciences in Budapest and studied children's and criminal psychology before becoming an artist. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College, UAL, and her works have been exhibited in the UK and internationally since 2013. She received corporate commissions from Hitachi Consulting, Discovery Networks and Open Society Foundations, and her work was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2022.

Réka's practice encompasses painting, VR, installation, print and photography. She uses motifs, materials, objects and spaces, often imbued with folkloric elements, to remind her of her childhood memories. Réka is most significantly inspired by the memories of her father's copper workshop in Budapest and the floral embroideries of her mother. She uses copper in her artworks, which helps to recall the beauty, excitement and safety of these memories and to reflect upon the difficult ones.

Through painting, she recently explored Hungarian folk art as meditative processes and coping mechanisms by which women created cultural continuity over centuries, counterbalancing the interruptive nature of war. The organic patterns Réka uses are inspired by, but do not imitate Hungarian folkloric patterns. Instead, they are the products of both critical thinking and surrender to traditions.

For Réka, the creative process is to understand the narrative of her recollections, identifying the underlying patterns and tendencies that pervade and the parallel patterns and tendencies that run across society and culture. It is a ceremonial quest to find remedies for fractures on all levels of human experience and, in a symbolic manner, to perform curative corrections and adjustments, treating the artwork as her teacher, child and ally.