Elina Pasok | Contemporary Artist, London

Relics of Mortal Desire

Relics of Mortal Desire is a participatory sculptural series of contemporary votive objects created for the immersive production The Shop for Mortals and All Fools.

Inspired by ancient Greek, Etruscan and Roman votive traditions, the Relics ask what an offering to the gods might look like now.

Ancient votives often gave physical form to immediate human needs: healing, fertility, protection, safe passage. Our desires have become harder to represent. We want to belong. To be chosen. To be forgiven. To know what comes next. To let go. To feel something again.

The Relics give these invisible desires physical form without illustrating them literally. Made from plaster, clay, thread, paper, ash and found natural fragments, each object feels somewhere between archaeological artefact, bodily fragment and ritual residue.

Presented in sealed blind boxes, the work introduces chance into the exchange. The participant cannot choose their Relic directly. The encounter is completed by whatever meaning they recognise in the object they receive.

The audience completes the work.

The Shop for Mortals and All Fools exists in a liminal space between periods: twentieth-century domestic objects coexist with much older mythologies and the presence of Cybele, the ancient Mother Goddess. The Relics occupy the same uncertain chronology. They might have been excavated two thousand years ago, or made yesterday.

Relics of Mortal Desire, 2026
Sculptural installation / participatory objects
Plaster, clay, thread, paper, ash and found natural materials
Created as part of the worldbuilding for The Shop for Mortals and All Fools, COLAB Tower, London.