Pregnant Figure IV. Brass and Sleeve Colors. From Pregnant Series “After Death Comes Life”

Pregnant Figure IV is cast from the same 3D scan of the artist’s pregnant body that forms the basis of the entire series. The scan was taken five months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine - and only days before Maria’s childbirth. The sculpture was first exhibited in New York at One Slider Found an Egg, Blue Like a Hesitant, created only a few months prior to its debut.

Its brass-like surface was produced through a long and laborious process: layer upon layer of paint mixed with metallic powder, pearlescent pigments, and varnish. Despite its golden appearance, the figure is not gilded; real gold leaf became nearly inaccessible in Ukraine after the invasion, or prohibitively expensive. The artist rejected cheaper substitutes - such as “petal,” a foil-like imitation - because they lacked the sacred materiality she envisioned. Maria still considers this sculpture unfinished: upon its return to Ukraine, she intends to gild it with real gold leaf - the same material used to cover church domes.

The decision to give the figure the color of brass and shell casings was deliberate. For years the artist’s studio was filled with boxes, buckets, entire heaps of casings brought from different parts of Ukraine. Each time she plunged her hand into a container to collect them, she felt as if she were “reaching into death.” Casings are paradoxical objects: they take life, yet in Maria’s work they also protect it, embedded into forms that carry new beginnings.

Yet Pregnant Figure IV diverges from earlier pieces in one profound way: her eyes are open. Traditional plaster casting requires closed eyes, but the 3D scan forced Maria to keep them open - maintaining eye contact with the technician as she struggled to stand through a difficult pregnancy. The result is a face that looks outward with hollow, uncarved eyes: open, seeing, yet sculpturally blind. This tension between vision and void becomes central to the work’s meaning.

Maria imagined this figure ultimately standing upon a pedestal of intertwined snakes - molded forms of skin, bones, scales. The snake, a symbol of betrayal, danger, and death, is also a symbol of feminine wisdom, rebirth, and cyclical renewal. Her choice is rooted in childhood memory: as a small child in Kerch, she wandered into the ruins of an ancient monastery and stepped directly into a nest of newly hatched snakes. The memory of near-fatal danger, of innocence confronting threat, formed a lifelong phobia, and a subconscious mythology that now resurfaces in her sculptures.

The snake imagery, the brass color, the open eyes, and the unfinished gilding are all connected to the state of pregnancy during war: heightened vulnerability, the sense of being watched by danger, the impossibility of protecting the unborn from a world already broken. The artist describes the work as “culminating”, but not complete - a sculpture suspended between fear and resilience.