Manchester artist Ivan Solod has spent more than 16 years working at the forefront of new media and digital creativity.
He began his career as a broadcast designer, drawn to the possibilities of emerging technology at a time when computer-generated graphics felt, as he describes it, like “real magic”. Since then, he has built an extensive career exploring the intersection of art, technology and visual storytelling.
“In a way, I guess I really wanted to become a magician,” he said.
That instinct eventually led him to media art. His latest installation is his most personal yet. It is built around the theme of migration and what it means to carry a language that the people around you cannot comprehend.
Ivan is one of three artists behind Terra Ephemera, a series of digital projections created in response to the collection of Terra Center for Fine and Applied Arts which houses over 1,200 monumental terracotta sculptures in a former military building in Kikinda, Serbia. His work, Little Birds, responds to a monumental bird bath sculpture by Montenegrin artist Željko Reljić, a basin of fired clay with a small bird perched on its rim.
The starting point was a poem about releasing a bird on foreign soil: the one small act of freedom still within an émigré’s reach. Solod read it aloud and turned the recording into birdsong. Custom code then rebuilt the poem’s letters from that sound and these are being displayed on a monitor beside the sculpture. Every letter is present, but the meaning of the poem became out of reach.
“The text is fully present and at the same time inaccessible,” says Solod.
“It simply sounds in another language.”
His projection mapping turns the still basin into an almost-real bird bath. Light ripples across the clay as if it were real water, while birdsong fills the air around it.
Little Birds is now travelling to Belgrade as part of Pearl Made of Clay, Terra’s first major international exhibition of contemporary terracotta sculpture. The exhibition will unfold across Silosi, a former grain storage brutalist complex on the banks of the Danube, listed by the Lonely Planet among the 25 best experiences in Europe for 2026. It opens on 12 June 2026.
A Mancunian by way of somewhere else, Ivan Solod has now released his birds into the world. If they follow the poem’s logic, Little Birds will hopefully find its way to Manchester.
