Tatiana Anfilova
NEW VOICES OF ANCIENT CERAMICS

Why people look in the past? Probably, to understand present and to expect future. The artist-ceramist Marina Stepanova-Lanskaya born and grown up in Siberia, there sources of her original creativity are hiding. The favourite theme has come not at once. At first there was a short period of work with porcelain, which has coincided with search of her own theme and art language. She have found help in her enthusiasm for primitive culture of Siberia, famous unique petroglyphs of the Khakass and archeological relics of Okunevskaya Culture. Therefrom by sort today's repertoir of artworks of the artist. Modern perusal of ancient vessels and cups, female torsoes and rock carvings awakes the imagination, gives rise to a chain of associations. Amazes figurativeness of these ancient and incredibly modern forms, they have incorporated principles of architectureness, sculptureness, natural organics, which places in the basis of complex symbolics. Plastic puns of Marina Stepanova-Lanskaya were born from these roll-call of form and sense, when female torso - simbol of fertility - turns into the cup or into the fixture as receptacle and source of life. So the eternal theme has become sense of creativity.
The artist has entered the dialogue with the past on the language of plastics.
Ancient images required also adequate way of their incarnation, therefore call to clay was inavitably - as to the most ancient natural material. Besides Stepanova-Lanskaya has invented new mode of work in ceramics. "I call my technique as ceramic painting" - she sais. Marina creates all cups and torsoes using of colour masses - mixture of clay with colourful pigments. However role of artificial dyes is minimum. Natural colours of clay first of all are used, thus are taken into account their colourful transformation after baking. The figurative relationship of ceramics is fixed by steady brown-terracotte gamma, as a matter of fact open of colours of ground. Rolling up and stacking small colour sausages of clay in necessary patterns, author creates ceramic pictures. In the other case it's as if she swaddle imagined forms of female torsoes, vessels and vases, combining in herself simultaneously sculptore and painter. makes) All ceramics are hand made and thus alive and animated. But it also attracts by some misteriousness. Sides of vessels and surfaces of ceramic pictures are occupied by ancient geometrical arabesques: by spirals and crosses, zoomorphistic and vegetative motives. These sacred signs also charge things of special energy, allocating their magic force and secret sense.

On materials of "Interior + design" magazine, January 2000