Maria Chevska
My paintings, and objects emerge through the interaction of idea, material, and process, and reflect an engagement with literature and poetry.
Since 1990 my work has explored and expanded on the more traditional boundaries of ‘painting’: positioning painted surfaces alongside made and found objects, for instance, and the use of historically specific items of furniture in my installations.
In ‘pictorial’ terms, the surfaces have been replaced with language drawn from a number of varied sources. The selected texts used are predominantly fragments of writing that elicit and reflect everyday acts of ‘being’. The extracts from Rosa Luxemburg’s prison letters in my exhibition ‘Can’t Wait’ (2004), for example, bear on both the physical, social, political and cultural world of the author herself, and the historical ‘situatedness’ of the contemporary viewer/reader.
Having previously worked in a number of art schools around the country, I became Head of Painting at the Ruskin in 1990. There is a strong sense of experiment, and confidence visible in our students’ work, the evident ambition to develop their own voice. Here, the students experience an intense learning environment within a small, intimate department, and in my dialogue with them I seek to help individuals realise their artistic ambitions, and to ensure a developmental context for their activities.
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