Part of the series Drive me Inside (2022) artist Maria Koshenkova have been experimenting with making self-supported sculptures that can uphold themselves and thus be exhibited without podiums. Working with glass as a material Koshenkova makes sculptures and installations that expands ideas surrounding the fragility of this material.
Drive me Inside (2022) were produced during her residency at College For Creative Studies, Detroit, and point to mobility aids and industrially produced commodities with reference to the history of Detroit as well as personal stress and healing. Merging glass with found objects such as a wheel chair, lamps and chairs Koshenkova makes the familiar unknown: Resembling body parts and organs glass objects merge with found steel and creating new forms and strange unknown creatures.
Text@Lotte Løvholm .2022.Copenhagen
In 2022 I began to connect glass sculptures with steel structures made of recycled materials, in order to free the sculptures from podiums.
Merging glass with industrial found objects such as a wheelchair, lamps and chairs, I make the familiar unknown.
The very process of making the two parts fit together and become one unit, as well as giving the static glass forms mobility, is a thematic anchor for this series.
The glass represents the human part – vulnerable, exposed and disabled - while the metal is a kind of a caregiver.
My intentions are to turn dramatic and violent life conditions into a positive poetic experience - to give some kind of hope.
As if the human organs after a car crash decide to go to a bar to have a drink.
They are bleeding and broken hearts and livers on wheels. Mobility and movement become a way of coping.
An important part of my work with glass is the intuitive hot sculpting, which I literarily do with my hands. And my artistic decisions are made while shaping. It is a performative and intense process comparable to improvisation in music or choreography.
The glass works consist of multiple parts, connected in a hot state – and are often recycled new versions of my own unsuccessful works.
I re-heat them and transform and use them in the process of building new sculptures.
Text: Maria Koshenkova/ Casper Ottar Jensen 2022