BIO
Maria Poe (aka Ponomareva) is an artist and designer recognized with numerous international awards, including Cannes Lions, Red Dot, The Dieline Awards, and Pentawards.
Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, a city known for both heavy industry and traditional crafts, she grew up between two worlds: her mother, an architectural critic, and her father, an engineer. This contrast between precision and expression later became central to her creative approach.
Maria holds degrees in Fine Arts and Economics from Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University and graduated from the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow, Russia. Her diploma project, Visual Identity of Nizhny Novgorod (2010), was among the first examples of territorial branding in Russia and remains in use today.
After more than a decade in visual communications, Maria was granted an O-1 artist visa in recognition of her international achievements and relocated to New York, where she shifted her focus from commercial design to contemporary art. Working primarily with ceramics and porcelain, she explores identity in relation to mass culture, transformation, and the tension between industrial form and human touch.
She currently lives and works in New Jersey, USA.
Artist Statement
My practice began with a single act—shaping a clay replica of a soda can and crushing it by hand. This gesture, transforming a fragile handmade object into a distorted echo of industrial form, became a way to reclaim meaning from the language of mass production.
Rooted in my background in packaging design, a discipline where surfaces sell illusions, my work reverses this process, transforming commercial language into a philosophical tool. I unpack objects, memories, the layered shells of human experience, and ultimately, myself.
I’m drawn to what lies beneath the gloss of the ordinary. Working within the field of contemporary ceramics, I use clay as a language of transformation. I work with contrasts: industrial and organic, controlled and accidental, to reveal the fragile balance between creation and decay. Each hand-formed can is both sculpture and commentary, a reimagined relic of consumer culture and a subtle act of appropriation. Symbols of mass production become a metaphor for the human condition, the intimate vocabulary of touch, and the authenticity of imperfection.
I invite the viewer to their own act of unpacking: to look beyond the surface and to question what we value and discard. In the end, the crushed can becomes an imprint of deliberate vulnerability and resilience, a way to unlearn the perfectionism of the advertising world.
Selected Awards
Pentawards, New York, USA
2018
HOW International Design Awards, USA
2017
Red Dot, Berlin, Germany
2017
HOW International Design Awards, USA
2017
Pentawards, New York, USA
2018
HOW International Design Awards, USA
2014
Cannes Lions, Cannes, France
2014
The Dieline Awards 2014, Boston, USA
2014
Golden Drum, Portorož, Slovenia
2013
Pentawards, New York, USA
2011