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 her solo show “Once Leda Found an Egg – Blue Blue Like a Hyacinth”, 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 potal, 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 months, while she was creating this series, the artist’s studio was filled with boxes, buckets, entire heaps of casings brought from the battlefields in 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, but they also protect it.

In the entire series, all the pregnant figures have open eyes — a consequence of the 3D scanning process, which required Maria to keep her gaze fixed and steady. Unlike traditional plaster casting, where the eyes must remain closed, the scan forced the artist to maintain eye contact with the technician while she struggled to stand through a difficult pregnancy. The resulting faces look outward with hollow, uncarved eyes: open, seeing, yet sculpturally blind. This tension between vision and void becomes central to the meaning of the work.

Maria imagined this figure ultimately standing upon a pedestal of intertwined snakes – molded forms of skin, bones, and 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.