Suspended Boards

“I found an old house in the middle of town, which was being demolished. I went inside out of pure curiosity and I found it extremely beautiful, sad and touching. The house was around 200 year old and the solid wooden walls were covered with layers of wallpaper. These were the marks of all the generations who had been living there, and in that sense it gave me the visual image of changing times, like year rings on a tree. A Polish worker was cutting it all into regular squares – so it would be more convenient to trash. It was a very powerful combination of beauty, decay, violence and a natural flow of time. An image of death and new things coming instead – which struck me. I wanted to have a piece of wall from this house to use for my new sculptures, which would give the same emotional charge as I got when I saw the house. The real object, which gave me this charge is gone. The house has seized to exist and I will never find another one just like that. But I preserved a small part of it and turned it into a group of sculptures, which I hope will bring about the poetic feeling of vanishing Scandinavian wooden structures, revealing an earlier life. The glass parts of my sculptures are exact casts of the wooden parts of the wall, but each of them has gone through a transformation – they are subtle and almost invisible but they still exist and this is very important to me. I want to take the viewers on a journey between the strange fragments of something bigger, which is now gone, and into their own images of what it once was through the sculptural hints I created. I wanted to transform this vanishing wood into new objects with a very different destiny, to give a feeling of the natural flow of life combined with a poetic, nostalgic aesthetic of things and matters evolving. Technically I was using the same molds again and again until they got completely destroyed and make the glass react on it. I used lost wax technique as well when I made a model. This can only be used once. In this way the method I used was very much a continuation and reflection of the process which the house I liked so much had gone through. The simple geometrical shapes – square and rectangular – are references to the regular structures of the house. I mostly used clear and grey glass to give the feeling of something on the border between existing and non-existing. And I added silver to emphasize the natural structures of the old wood and to show that apparent pieces of trash can be treasures.” MariaKoshenkova