Mariana Vassileva
The Big Puddle

Mariana Vassileva’s The Big Puddle combines the artist’s sculptural and photographic work. The subject of the photograph is a map of the world, which Vassileva has modeled flat in clay and then filled with water and photographed. Strictly speaking, she has cut the five continents out of the clay layer so that they now appear as water-filled puddles, while the oceans around them are solid matter, i.e. clay and therefore earth. Despite the reversal of the elements, the rough contours still refer to a representation of the globe flattened into a map – albeit very free in its proportions and extremely imprecise in its details. The non-colorfulness of the photography in shades of grey conveys a gloomy, dystopian image of our earth as a single “big puddle”.
“I had the idea for The Big Puddle on the plane from Singapore to Berlin, when a feeling of confusion and disorientation would not let go of me. (…) The first thing I did after arriving in Berlin was to fill a baking tray with clay, cut out the continents and fill them with water. That’s exactly what my confusion felt like.”¹
Text: Eva Scharrer

¹ Mariana Vassileva in an E-Mail to René Block dated August 4, 2022.