Over a thousand years ago, a Chinese painter Wu Daozi stood beside a mural which he had just finished. He clapped his hands, and a gate he had painted in the mural opened. He took a step forward and walked into the world of his painting. The gate closed behind him, and the mural faded away, leaving behind a white wall.
I see drawing as a frame of mind. By immersing myself into my work and forgetting the flow of time I am able to live in the moment. It reminds me of my childhood, when I could spend the whole summer’s day in the nearby woods, building huts and arranging small pebbles into various compositions. In fact, it is still sometimes like that. When I go out for a walk, I pick up pieces of wood which I later examine back in the studio. I often know their shape by heart as I have drawn them dozens of times. I place them next to one another on paper over and over again.
The conceptual and the intuitive are equally important to me. The white paper, which plays an important role in my work, is simultaneously a surface and an empty space where the carefully drawn elements are located. With their lights and shadows, drawings make reference to a space around them. A state of mind, an imaginary place, a story, huts on paper and the emptiness around them, both exist and do not exist, at different times, in different places, merged and layered.
mariapkknen@gmail.com