Timeless Dialogue

“As the years go by, I find myself thinking more and more intensely about origins—the origins of art, of humanity, of myself. I recall the years of my Moldavian childhood, over which a Transylvanian heritage was later layered. That gaze from my childhood filters the world, the objects, and my relationship with the surrounding nature. It helps me uncover mysteries, it keeps my sense of wonder intact. It continues to stir my curiosity, the sometimes playful desire to reveal a hidden world, to enter a secret one; it compels me to step on the borders of forbidden territories, to sew and unsew the ephemeral, to build “castles” (now called “installations”), to relive and recompose those first sensations and contacts with generous forms, with the sensuality of curves.

Thus, I discover a Paradise sketched with hundreds of kilometers of threads and textile fibers, I find gold in the dust of hay-dried grasses. I feel this urge to share with others the richness I see beyond the veil of things and humble materials. Memories and the past, tradition, speak to me, and through them the world of plants becomes animated, cut out and ordered according to new criteria. My works recount stories about Romanian beliefs and rituals, about archetypes that govern us. Hypertrophied seeds and elements of the natural and the organic multiply and generate a new world of beginnings, of new fruitings.” (Mariana Gheorghiu)

“Wherever it finds the right conditions, life flourishes. What unseen force beyond time and space makes a blade of grass sprout through a crack in a rock, or a flower bloom from moss growing on a stone? The great mystery behind all that we see can never be truly represented. What I want through my ceramic creations is to send the heart beyond the visible, beyond forms, to generate a state of innocence that makes you silent and expansive. For me, true love is to be and to see the connection with everything and all, beyond the mind and illusory forms. There is, however, a limit to what art can express, and beyond that limit, only silence and the understanding of the viewer can reach. Even within the bounds of our duality, the subtle play between opposites has its own beauty: ephemeral and eternal, delicate and strong, small and large—together they form the whole.

Beyond the expressed intention of the creator, every creation contains more than that—something that comes from the mystery I spoke of, which manifests freely and without limits.

I like to believe that a mind greater than ours generated the idea for the exhibition as a dialogue between myself and Mariana Gheorghiu. I work with earth, Mariana with grasses. We aim neither for similarities nor contrasts, but simply to be ourselves and to trust in the unseen force that guides our joy of creation.” (Ionela- Sandrina Mihuleac)