Aftermath 2094: Maria Gerguis
What is your work about?
Memory.
What are you trying to communicate?
I am trying to find myself and liberate my soul from both bad and good memories. Perhaps, whoever sees my artwork may find ways through their own emotions and memories too.
Does your work link to, or are you inspired by any aspect of Our Silver City, 2094?
The colours I have used are inspired the colours in the fabrics in Celine Condorelli’s installation and her interest in the chemical properties of colour production. I also took inspiration from the ideas within Liz Jensen’s novella Our Silver City, 2094. The notion of the uncertainty of memory expressed in the prologue to The Stone Sky, N.K Jemison’s The Broken Earth trilogy, was also inspirational.
Describe your process of developing your work from ideas, through planning, to experiments and production.
My work for Aftermath 2094 consists of 1.2m mdf discs coated in colourful papers, cardboards and coloured using a range of inks and other substances.
What does it mean to you to make this work?
The special connection we all share with our memories is important to me, that can both restrain and free us. Some of us are trapped in past happy moments whilst others are drowning every day in past traumas. I am trying to contextualize this space between us and our memories in the hope of allowing memories to be left perhaps beyond the past.
What do you hope visitors will experience or take away?
Wabi Sabi is a Japanese aesthetic that recognizes beauty in the incomplete and imperfect. From my perspective, memories which are incomplete are sometimes traumatizing, so I hope that my artwork will help the visitors make peace with their memories and find their own beauty through them.