Have you heard the old adage “mom knows best”? intuition is that feeling of knowing something. I have been practicing it for the last twenty years. I use this superpower in my studio and try to figure out how I just know.
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I work with really old materials — wool, metal, and glass — that humans have been using for thousands and thousands of years. Long before smartphones, before cars, even before written language. I think these materials have a memory. They remember the people who came before us, and I think they are curious about us too.
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I start by cutting colorful wool felt into blobby shapes that resemble clouds or amoebas. Then I sew them together with hundreds of tiny stitches until they become soft, squishy sculptures with a personality of their own. I put them in my washing machine to shrink and thicken them — like a cashmere sweater that went through the wrong cycle, but completely on purpose.
Then I coat them in wax, make molds, create wax patterns, and pour in molten metal or crystal. If a sculpture is too complex for a mold, I skip the wax pattern and burn the wool out directly from inside the ceramic shell. When the wax and wool burn away, they leave behind a perfect ghost of themselves in the mold. The metal or crystal fills the empty space and becomes a new object.
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I photograph them, project the photos onto walls, and turn the sculptures into an environment you can walk through. The sculptures invisibly hover in the middle of the room like the internet, until caught on the wall or a person. I invite everyone in to find their own shadows and play. I collaborate with dancers. They move through the light and the projections and become part of the work. I photograph them too. Those pictures tell their own stories.
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I think of each piece like a child. It starts small, grows, changes, and goes out into the world to meet people. And just like kids and parents grow up and grow older together, my work and my memories keep cycling through each other, like a roundabout that never stops.
Bio
Anna Kovina was born in Moscow and raised in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where she developed early passions for visual arts and rhythmic gymnastics. She immigrated to the United States in 1995 at the age of 17, where she subsequently earned degrees in finance and law, leading her to practice law in Palo Alto, California.
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In 2021, Anna relocated to Richmond, Virginia, where she began studying sculpture at VCUArts. She discovered glass-forming and other studio practices that aligned with her interest in material exploration and high-temperature processes. She earned her BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media and continues developing interdisciplinary work, creating sculptures from fiber, metal, and glass, dispersing them into light beams, and opening them to interpretation through improvisational movement.
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Anna has received professional recognition, including Dean's Best in Show at VCU's 2024 Juried Undergraduate Exhibition and the Vikki Katel Memorial Scholarship. Her research has been supported through VCU grants examining feminist art practices and the social psychology of childbirth. She has been awarded a fellowship at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts at Mount St. Angelo in Amherst, Virginia, and selected as an artist in residence by KALA Art Institute in Berkeley, California in 2025.