Slovenian countryside, hay-racks, the artist Vida Fakin
Travelling through the countryside of Slovenia, through the intimate patchwork of fields and enclosures, attention is repeatedly drawn to the hay-racks that stand sometimes isolated in pasture and sometimes clustered around farmsteads.
These hay racks embody a very direct and very local chain from soil to plant to beast to field. Hay is cut from meadows and grassy places, collected and hung over horizontal wooden poles to dry, then fed to farm animals when the natural pasture is out of season.
The hay-racks take on a range of forms, from two simple concrete posts spanned by a corrugated iron roofing strip to two-storied structures having the wooden poles along the side, rooms above, partly open at least on one side, and a place below for farm machinery (images below).
So it was good fortune to meet the daughter (Mojca Suklje) and granddaughter (Helena Suklje) of the artist Vida Fakin whose interests, among many, were the ikons of the Slovenia countryside and in particular its hay-racks and scarecrows set against a backdrop of mountain pasture and rocky hills.
And it was even better when Mojca and Helena agreed to provide material about Vida and her art for the Living Field web site.
We will begin with the notes for an exhibition of Vida Fakin’s works held in 2015 at the Josef Stefan Institute Ljubljana.
The black and white images above were taken by the editor in the Bohinj area of Slovenia, around Studor and on higher pasture.
The image at the top of the page is the front cover of Monografija / Vida Fakin – Ljubljana: Enotnost 1994.
Living Field page on Vida Fakin. Also More than landscape and Hay-racks.