Maria Joranko
Goldsmiths MFA Award
2023
MARIA is a mixed media artist+performer, dancer, musician, and researcher who is specifically interested in examining how healing, transformation, and change can be presented as possibilities within an arts context. She is currently based in London where she maintains a practice that is integrated with meditation, bodywork, and sculpture, while using soil and plant based materials as the main conduits for connection with the Earth, ancestors, and those who are yet to come. Maria draws on carried knowledge from her Latinx, American, and Indigenous biological+chosen family, her research in decolonial land practices, and racial activism experiences to create objects that are relics from a potential future that has sustained equity and sense of magic connection. With our bodies constantly being subjected to systemic pressures and oppressions, the goal is to continue bringing people physically together to experience potentials from this world for collective experiences of restoration+healing. It is necessary that we see our possibilities for change and let our imaginations take the steps to begin pivoting towards an equitable reality and with each physical piece and performance, MARIA infuses a longing for a portal to these worlds based in love.
Maria was selected for the 2022/23 Goldsmiths MFA Award by a panel including Phoebe Cripps, Curator at Goldsmiths CCA, and the artist Clémentine Bedos from a shortlist of six MFA graduate artists from Goldsmiths.
Goldsmiths MFA Award
The Goldsmiths MFA Award is a partnership between Acme, Goldsmiths, University of London and Jane Hamlyn. Aiming to provide a bridge between art school and professional practice, the award includes a generous bursary, rent-free studio space and a mentoring programme. Recipients of Acme’s Early Career Awards Programme work from shared studios in order to encourage an environment of peer support and critical dialogue.
