Fragments: Through my fingers
After successful exhibitions of her collage works, for the first time Antonia is embarking on an exploration of three-dimensional spatiality through the assemblage technique. She is inspired by the surrounding abandoned and neglected materiality of her village—the territory of her childhood memories—in order to breathe new life into the discarded household artifacts, to recycle them, and to create completely new objects—works of art recontextualized in the gallery space but still preserving the feeling and spirit of rural comfort of her grandmother's house.
Antonia succeeds in transforming the purposeful collection and search for material means of expression into a process of unconscious and spontaneous finding of memories lost in time. Through her nostalgic longing for the past childhood world, she analyzes the universal sense of loss, embodying it in the very fabric of her works.
The main focus of the artist is on the tactility of each of the materials used, on the sensory feeling of touch, and the traces left in a direct and figurative sense both on the materials themselves and on the skin of her fingers. By handling raw elements such as glass, metal, wood, and ceramics in a rather rough and primal way, she achieves balance and dynamic in her compositions, adding the softer and more natural feel of pieces of fabric, paper, and dried flowers. In this way, she seeks to connect even more deeply, intuitively, and tangibly with her own history and ancestral memory.