Maria JJ Juchnowska

Is the piece about the body, my body, which I transform in various ways to tell a story about “the body death” and connect it with other factors like timeline, process, beauty, and the ugly, I am trying to raise awareness of the hidden death of the body, excluded from our contemporary societies.  Experiencing this kind of death gave me the inspiration to express it through the language of art.

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The collection of sculptures was created between 2010-2011 for the MFA Master Diploma at Konstfack Sween

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More from Master thesis:

The leading idea of my Master’s project is based on private experiences which became an inspiration for making an artistic project and writing my Master’s thesis.

“I want to make my art personal but not private,” is my main statement in creating my works. I believe talking about what touches me through my artwork should move and become close to my audience.
At the beginning of working on this project, I wanted to raise awareness of body death and body decay which is excluded from daily lives and not quite visible in our contemporary societies until it touches us personally. Through the work, I realized that the project is not just about body death (my first inspiration), but is bringing a whole lot of new qualities: time, time passing, timeline, aging, transformation, the process of existing (making), and the process of dying. Comparing what is or can be considered as “beauty”- superficiality, external beauty – with what is or can be “ugly” – ugliness in the physical context – is a very important aspect of my work. In my work, I use my own aesthetics to create definitions of ugly and beauty and body death which are based on previous inspirations and because the process of making became more important than expected before it shifted to this particular state.

I decided to “lock myself” (my torso) in a dead sculpture. I am keeping a particular moment of time and displaying “how” I looked like, sometime before “now”. My torso is created by me and I can choose when it is “alive” and when it is “dead”. I treat my project as an ongoing study that will not end with my graduation from Konstfack. In my thesis, I am introducing my inspirations and fascinations, the process of making, and the transformation of the project. With inspiration and fascination, I am investigating different artistic approaches that I have chosen from contemporary art. I am interested in creating art based on craft making and I am highlighting an important and huge influence of process and transformation.