Unruly Matter

Maria Kunigk’s work unfolds in the space between quiet restraint and timid disorder, where form slips between order 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 fragile, 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. “I am no longer from there, but not fully from here either". Her practice inhabits thresholds rather than destinations, spaces where belonging is always deferred. The forms she conjures appear caught between presence and erasure—seen yet not fully recognized, precariously balance at the edge of visibility. In this tension, the work points to the quiet injuries of existing without a secure place in the order of things.

Kunigk’s embrace of fragility and instability extends further: her materials resist coherence, her images slip between abstraction and the familiar. This refusal to settle is not an aesthetic gesture alone but an insistence on acknowledging the volatility of the structures we live within. Forms unravel, pause, or fracture, echoing a world where certainties are easily undone.

Layered within this is the inevitability of impermanence—the shifting ground of time itself. Aging, change, and loss enter the work not as sentiment but as fact: everything remains provisional, vulnerable, unfinished. By holding her forms between structure and not fully done, Kunigk reveals the fragility of life lived without guarantees.

Unruly Matter is a strategy. Kunigk allows her materials to misbehave, welcoming the glitch, the flaw, the unfinished. 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, and yet still holding on.

“It’s the breath between thinking and speaking or that moment before the meaning. It’s the quiet space that lets us just feel rather than be told. The silence always attracts me.”

“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