Eva Smerekanych

Statement

As an artist with a math background, I’ve always been fascinated by the realm where math becomes art and art becomes math. Early on, this led to an obsession with topology, spending hours lost in thought experiments aiming to visualize 4-dimensional geometries, asking not only what they would look like, but what they would feel like. Recently, I’ve been using my art to ask: “How can we visualize consciousness as interactions with higher dimensional space?” I approach my sculptures with the same obsession, sculpting every detail by hand using clay and a few simple tools. With the human body as my subject, my ultimate goal is to showcase the beauty and pain of being alive and getting to ponder the vast mysteries of our existence.

Artworks

As humans, we are physically constrained to 3-dimensional space. But our consciousness? Our emotions? Where do they come from? During a particularly painful breakup a few years ago, I had an epiphany: maybe this is what it would feel like to get punched in the chest by a 4-dimensional monster. If I was a 2D being living in a flat piece of paper and some 3D person punched a hole in my chest, I imagine the sensation would feel similar. Perhaps emotions exist in the fourth dimension. Hyperpunch is my attempt at projecting the 4D experience of heartbreak into a 3D plane. I drew inspiration from forms like Klein bottles and black holes, aiming to capture the feeling of being sucked into an infinite hole in my chest from all directions.