Ken artspace presents an exhibition of new work by the artist Maria Chevska. During the summer she worked in the space, experimenting with forms of presentation of her painting and sculpture.
In her own words, Chevska describes the evolution of the exhibition as:
“ …starting during the Lockdowns of 2020 – brown packing paper arrived in abundance; it was essentially a waste product, an abject material and of no other use value. Usually disposable, the brown paper became my clay to create forms, and to playfully vitalise it into ‘characters’ – they appeared degraded, yet triumphant in their existence and efforts towards communication. For example: some slouch, some reach out, some grand-stand….one tries to dance…
Transformation was important to ‘them’ – the smallest figure was known to me as ‘My Magician’.
And, then back in the real world – the recycling of this by-product became a playful, hand-worked material for a growing series of soft sculptures. “
The paintings around the sculpture take up familiar themes within her work and offer a potentially re-arrangeable wall in terms of their spatial sequencing, abstract in form, yet, discernible imagery within the paintings themselves to be read as visual narrative. Chevska sees them as “maps (possibly sentences) for others to receive.”’
Each canvas has a close-to focus on – sounds/exchange of words, breath, body, affective space between images – with an emphasis specifically on ears. Ears (human/animal) are transmitters, resonant as thresholds between outside to inside. The exaggerated presence of this sense can be alert, absurd, hybrid, or be fragile conductors for our collective connectivity.
