Mariya Apostolova
Looking through the processes of transformation and transmutation, my work is ultimately seeking the emergence of a new meaning. The experience of creative mediation increases my awareness of self and world, resulting into a deeper appreciation of the dynamic equilibrium between the environment and the self. An inquiry I aspire to develop in the creation of healing spaces.
Mariya is an artist who comes with skills in visual, traditional and performance arts, and has previously worked in costume and film production design. In the last five years, she has been developing a studio practice in sculptural work. Clay has been Mariya’s primary material which she questions through the application and interpretation of steel, paper, written word, found material, projection and her own body.
A visceral dance between nature and the built environment, Mariya's investigations live in the rupture of the form, the spiral that binds together the past and the present, the individual and the collective, the part and the whole. By extracting meaning from the science of body and nature, and through the experience of motherhood cast away in the life of an immigrant, she continues to define the context of her explorations. Resolutions are less important than the observation of dynamic relationships in places of contact, break and imprint. Formal studies seek the tension and vulnerability of an impact within a circular time, where the conception of boundaries takes place in constant negotiation.
A form of “embodied earth,” where a feeling is submerged into an inner landscape to resurface through the process of creation, Mariya associates and merges the tangible and visceral sensitivity of clay with the body, and, therefore, considers her work performative. Mariya comes from a culture where the reverence to earth and soil is embodied in ritual, traditional song, bread, dance and customs. A celebration of life that flows over into a long lived practice in ceramics. Her childhood pastime of laying down in the warm meadows of wild flowers would deepen her relationship with nature even further. Yet, she discovered her passion for ceramics an ocean away. Displacement and uprooting forced her creative process into an intense self-inquiry investigating positionality within the immediacy of the physical and psychological environment.
Before Mariya returns to school to pursue her degree in studio arts, she works as a film production designer, and is also actively engaged in the art direction for cultural events with the Bulgarian Cultural and Heritage Center in Seattle. She leads a monthly program for traditional arts and crafts for children called Tvorilnitsa. Mariya graduates from University of Washington School of Art and Design with a concentration in Ceramics and Sculpture and a Minor in Urban Ecological Design.
Exhibitions
2021 ALL Planet Earth, Contemporary Art Gallery Online Art Competition and Exhibition
2020 Landscapes, Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery, Online Art Competition, Special Recognition for “Perpetually elemental”
2020 Earth, Zest Hall, Online Exhibition
2020 Checklist, Online Solo Senior Thesis Exhibition
https://www.filmabee.com/checklist
2020 A World Becoming With, BA Graduation Exhibition
https://uwbaartexhibition.com/mariya-apostolova/
2019 CoCa – Seattle, Motherland: March 7 - April 20 – group exhibition
2018 North Seattle College Group Show – Group Exhibition
2018 What's your story? - Emergence – ceramic, North Seattle College, Annex space, Solo Exhibit
2018 Singing Chestnut – ceramic, North Seattle College, Annex Space, Solo Exhibit
Bibliography
2019 Inhuman – Five portraits of Rome, poetry. Skin and Plastic, installation art
2019 Licton Springs Review, Seattle. Self-undoing, ceramic figure
2018 Licton Springs Review, Seattle. Rainaways, ceramic
Awards
2019 – 2020 Doris Totten Chase Endowed Scholarship
2019 - Writing in Rome Residency Scholarship
Education
2020 BA with 3-Dimensional Forum Concentration, University of Washington Seattle
2018 North Seattle Community College, Seattle WA
2016 - 2018 Antioch University, Seattle WA
2006 Red Rocks Community College, Golden CO