EPHEMERAL SCULPTURES | nikolai-marcinowski

Our fast-paced way of living has made us very good in pushing away

all thoughts about evanescence and death.

The way we design our surroundings reveals that we don’t want to be aware of the fact that everything is temporal and changing.

By contrast, in Japanese wabi-sabi philosophy

impermanence, imperfection and incompletion are considered essential aesthetic principles that convey beauty.

Traces of time and use, of physical forces in general, are thought to be an increment value. I find this idea of embracing vulnerability very impressing and powerful, so I built a series of objects that correspond to this concept.

The filigree sculptures shown here are made to transport a visual idea of ephemerality and transitoriness forcing the viewer to contemplate his or her own mortality and to find beauty in the fragile and vulnerable.

The material I used is rice paper, a substance that has a special connotation in wabi-sabi: it submits light in a diffuse glow and hence corresponds to the idea of transcendence.

Sometimes the dried-out forms look like cloth floating in water,

simultaneously frozen and unmoving, a contradiction that refers to time and the unability to stop it from passing.

NikolaI

Marcinowski