Unruly Matter

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 resolved. 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 exact moment before naming the meaning. It’s the quiet space that lets us just feel rather than be told. The silence always attracts me.”

The idea behind Unruly Matter in Maria Kunigk’s work is both conceptual and material. It refers to her deliberate embrace of what resists order—emotionally, visually, and physically. “Unruly” here signals a refusal to conform to polished expectations: her materials are allowed to wander, glitch, and break . “Matter” speaks to both the physical stuff of her work (thread, pigment, image) and the deeper subjects she addresses—absence, memory, belonging, vulnerability and displacement.

Rather than controlling every element, Kunigk creates space for fragile imperfections, instability, and unresolved emotion. Unruly Matter becomes a strategy of letting go, allowing fragility, adaptation, and ambiguity to guide the process. The result is work that hovers between presence and absence, structure and collapse—always in flux, quietly insistent, and deeply human.