Unruly Matter

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 avoided it for too long. She now uses it intensively but 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.

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

“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 always in flux, quietly insistent, and deeply human.