Hugh Frost
Lubov Archipova’s Sock - heavily darned footwear drawn from a photograph in collector Vladimir Archipov’s survey of Soviet folk artifacts. An array of unique objects made or repaired by ‘ordinary Russians inspired by a lack of immediate access to manufactured goods during the collapse of the Soviet Union’, collected in Home-Made (FUEL Publishing). Archipov had sought state support for preservation and display of more than one thousand items - including a TV aerial made of forks, a bath plug made of a shoe sole and a house for a queen bee made from a hair curler - though writing in 2006 had still been unsuccessful, suspecting that in the contemporary climate the prevailing political mood was in favour of forgetting the shortages and failings of the Soviet era, over archiving the objects and the begrudging ingenuity of their makers.
