Unruly Matter

Maria Kunigk’s work unfolds in the space between restraint and disorder, where form slips between structure and unraveling, and meaning refuses to settle. Trained in traditional image-making, analog photography, digital image manipulation, and grounded in art history, she brings now a quiet, reflective depth to a practice that resists resolution — both emotionally and visually. Her pieces emerge from vulnerability, longing, and a quiet sense of displacement, reflecting what feels unfinished: a space between belonging and not. She’s no longer from there, but not fully from here either. The sewing machine is her art tool and was left by her mother, who was a descended from a lineage of seamstresses and lace makers. Always drawn to it, she kept distanced from it for too long. She now uses it not to craft objects of utility or perfection like her ancestors, but more subversively—to stitch together absences and losses through quiet, intuitive gestures that resist resolution. Thread becomes a drawing that hesitates mid-line; pigment bleeds into near-invisibility. Nothing insists on clarity. Her work becomes a kind of unspoken language, much easier to fell than said—where vulnerability and doubt overtake logic or certainty.

Unruly Matter is a strategy. Kunigk allows her materials to misbehave, welcoming the glitch, the flaw, the overgrowth. Her works suggest gardens gone rogue, images half-remembered, structures barely holding together. The forms—somewhere between petals, scars, and maybe uncertain paths—never fully land. That in-between is where she finds meaning. It’s not about resolution or fitting in, but about holding space for what is always adapting, yet still holding on.

“It’s the breath before the word or that moment before the meaning. It’s the quiet space that lets us just feel rather than be told.”

“The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

contact: cikunigk@gmail.com