Feb 4, 2025

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Apr 27, 2025

Masha Vintskevich was born in Russia and graduated from the art and graphic faculty of one of the Russian institutes. For many years, she worked as a graphic designer on various music-related projects. In 2014, she plunged headlong into the world of ceramics. Ceramics unexpectedly opened up a new way for her to understand the world and her place in it, altering her usual way of thinking and perception, and offering her a previously unknown path of co-creation. It became a silent, frank conversation—an incessant internal dialogue with the material, with herself, and with the world around her.

Ceramics provided her with the opportunity to explore her individual inner landscape. It became an attempt to reflect on her journey through life, its strength and fragility, as well as to embody non-material concepts such as the unconscious, feelings, premonitions, the thought process, and time. It was an effort to bring to life deep personal experiences and ancestral memory that lives within each of us.

Currently, her main focus is ceramics. Clay is a material that is intimately connected to human nature. As she reflects on reality and her path, searching for and receiving answers, she strives to mold her reality in the truest sense of the word.

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Artist Statement

As a new wave emigrant who has fled dictatorship and war to a country built by emigrants, Masha Vintskevich is deeply concerned with the process of her own growth in this new land—one that offers everyone the opportunity to put down roots. She sees this as an opportunity to thrive and give new shoots in this generous soil.

In the beginning, the grain must first perish before it can germinate. The ripened grain, taken from the spike, cannot germinate immediately. It must dry out, encapsulate, pass through the "dead" stage, and survive its own winter before yielding new shoots.

Emigration is a process where the old, established life dies, and a new, different life must be built on unfamiliar soil. Yet, the "foundation" remains in the baggage carried along. Even new knowledge takes time to settle into memory. At a minimum, we must sleep on it for a night to fully realize what we perceived the day before. For an emigrant torn from the roots of their land and with a sense of homelessness, this incubation period lasts not just a night but often months, sometimes years.

The history of humanity demonstrates the eternal yearning to find the supports of existence—those that block out the horror of the potential end of the world in every moment. This is the existential origin of the category of "being."

Choice becomes a tale of survival, a narrative of germination and healing, a story of liberation and the power of the human spirit. We can always choose what life teaches us. Life pushes its shoots through dry, fissured soil, through concrete and asphalt. It contends within us and "demands its outlet and discovery." This is the pursuit of the meaning of life, the search for what is already within us, on this new ground. The resumption of interrupted vitality is Germination.

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