sibiu, september 2017
Born in Cluj-Napoca in 1984, Ana-Maria Morar moved to the USA in 2009, where she embarked on a journey filled with transformative experiences. These new encounters accentuated a deep search for meaning and the essence of the self that threw her into the art world. After experimenting with multiple mediums, she arrived at sculpture.
Ana-Maria studies sculpture in New York. This is where the biography of her artworks starts, with Emptying the inside with a spoon - a project that she fully dedicates herself to. The object that marks the beginning of this project is a spoon. An object snatched out of the ordinary and the banal, but with strong symbolism, deeply rooted in the very nature of the human being. With the spoon, we feed ourselves and feed others. Its hollowness resembles the shape of half an egg. The cosmic egg, its crack unfolding the entire universe.
This object triggers a whole process of artistic and semiotic exploration, a process fueled by the desire to push the limit of its corporeality and symbolic possibilities. For the artist, the focus is first of all in the sculptural process. Her artworks are born out of a conscious fusion with the dynamics of this process. The forms created by her are simple forms, reduced to essence. In a continuous search for acceptance, embracing and disconnecting from the pain-body and ego. The simplicity of her artworks is not spontaneous but it is the mere result of a sustained and sometimes painful and intense interaction with the material.
Her artworks speak about the man in general, about our relation to various worlds that inhabit us, about our need for change, suffering, becoming and death. In her early artworks like first seed, artificial flower or end of the journey, the spoon is presented as the main character. It initiates the dialogue and brings significance without being subjected to substantial interventions in form.
Gradually, in the ensuing artworks, the spoon becomes an abstract presence, a subtle entity, indistinguishable and spiritual. so we shall be is one of the sculptures that make the transition to the stage in which the spoon as an element begins to dissolve, to become spiritual. The artwork is characterized by fragility and candor, and it becomes alive through an act of fusion of its elements. It is a fluid artwork that has the potential of transposing the receptor in an ancestral rhythm of life. It interrogates and visually redefines human traits, like the desire for communion, in the essence, conjured by Martin Buber’s das Ich wird am Du.
free of the shoes becomes an occasion for contemplation upon her own inner Scala libera (J. Beuys). Each rung is a spoon, a physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual food source that wants to be acknowledged and manifested.
hear not my steps which way they go draws the artist to the quantic universe of the Hyphen series of sculptor Paul Neagu. The spoon manifests its character of a host-universe, integrated and reflected by the objects it contains. Wooden piano hammers with felt heads that the artist extracted from an old piano are recontextualized and transformed into symbols that resemble the human anatomy; a symbol of the authentic man. An embodiment of the unity and vibration of the universal sound. A reminder of the fact that man is a mere reflection of the universal conscience and that he can return to a state of unity with it, casting away the shadow of its mental causality and determinism. The artwork itself becomes a symbol of the texture of human consciousness, a symbol of its nonduality. A reminder of the fact that conscience is not an epiphenomenon of thought but the source itself, the essence and the binder.
surely not I recollect the biblical scene of the Last Supper. In a surprising visual display, the piece synthesizes the meaning and evolution of the artist’s previous works. It also opens a new visual path in her artistic journey. We do not find individuality, archetypes or the solemn atmosphere which characterizes the classical works of The Supper. The artwork captures instead human and universal dynamics in their primal, pure form. Moments of pursuit. Of becoming. Of inner struggle. Of awareness. The elements, once spoons, become the symbol of a perpetual movement that unites polarities such as wrapping-unwrapping, contraction-expansion, involution-evolution, incident-divine, creating something that contains everything.
Is there anything that doesn’t fit into something? - Anselm Kiefer
text by kristina ratiu demuth, artist, art terapeut and founder at Farbenlicht arta si art-terapie