Anna Kovina is a visual artist and sculptor, based in Richmond, Virginia.  Anna's practice encompasses site-specific installations, sculpture, and works on a single plane, giving form to the washed out contours of a beautiful body, simultaneously capable of feeling both pain and pleasure.  Her works appear to crack, blister, and recede into unsettling bodily cavities.  They struggle for stability, they threaten, and they comfort.  Some of the works can be cradled in the palm of one hand.  Others are enthroned on hollow altars.  There is no right side up or a front view.  They are borne, in part, of her multidisciplinary research into the social psychology of childbirth.  This theoretical knowledge is guided by her lived experience, birthing and mothering her own three children.  She reconfigures the ancient craft traditions of bronze casting, glass forming, and textile work, all the while having her work speak out-of-turn. She works intuitively and directly, often impelled by the physical interaction of her hands with the materials.  In repeated rounds of manipulation with sewing needles, torches, and washing machines, transformation continuously occurs. Throughout this process, Kovina searches for and magnifies the surprises, the faults, and the chasms that she encounters.  In collaboration with extreme temperatures, the materials are forged into anamolous dancers, prime for tranfiguration into embryos, vulvas, or felted Russian snow boots, the “valenki.”  In their amalgamated abstraction, they cannibalize Anna’s many lives as an artist, a lawyer, a farmer, and a mother - at home in Moscow, Tashkent, and Sonoma County.  Like their maker, Kovina’s works survive as time-traveling relics, recording the somatic reverberations of the personal within the political. Anna is a mother of three children and has lived and worked in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, CA prior to relocating to Richmond in 2021.