Nika Neelova

Often utilising reclaimed architectural materials, Nika Neelova is interested in the way materials and architecture influence our sense of time and place. Bypassing straightforward means of fabrication, her work is concerned with finding modes of retrieving and revealing information that is already there and the multiplicities of histories concealed within in as a way of finding and imagining evidence of human pasts through inanimate things. The sculptures are often created by employing tactics of 'reverse archaeology' - considering an alternative reading of human history by examining found objects and architectural debris, and transforming them beyond functionality. In these works the human body and touch remains as a vestigial memory. Drawing arks between different time periods and disciplines the sculptures form part of larger cycles, temporarily arrested in their current form. Neelova attribute high importance to material transformations often inspired by the latent potency immanent in the materials. The sculptures are often focused on the conversions involved in translating existing objects into other mediums, decoding and recoding their purposes, enacting the processes that were used to shape them, altering their internal structures and liberating objects from their meaning.