Maria van Rooyen is a South African artist, currently working and residing in Polokwane, Limpopo Province. The artist’s creative process is inspired by her emotional responses to life events and written material, particularly South African literature. Her work deals primarily with the consequence of ideologies on both the individual and society as a whole. Maria’s current body of works may be defined as mixed media drawings. She combines ink, and charcoal drawing techniques with layers of collage, assembled from individual strips of paper hand-embossed with coin rubbings, which collectively form abstracted landscapes and figures. Each embossing carefully chosen and subject-specific is laden with the history, and the future of Southern Africa and the world. Currencies are in constant flux, and become a vehicle for symbolizing the actions and reactions of the human species. Conceptually, the monitory values, coin embossings and imagery, together with the drawing’s representation as a whole bind the course of history.
