Tamara Kostianovsky: Phantom Limbs

In Tamara Kostianovsky’s work, landscapes and flesh become indistinguishable. Through life-size textile sculptures of carcasses and severed trees, the artist invites viewers to experience ecological loss as intimate and immediate.

Kostianovsky’s practice originates from an early experience assisting in a surgeon’s office where she encountered a landscape of veins, ligaments, and fat activated by vivid color and dense texture. Since that formative experience, she has created life-sized forms resembling cross-sections of flesh that emphasize rupture while hinting at the possibility of care, resilience, and regeneration.

A recent visit to the high desert region of northwestern Argentina, where Kostianovsky encountered a landscape populated by towering columnar cacti known as cardones, inspired this latest body of work. She was drawn to these plants for their anthropomorphic presence and fleshy, bodily appearance. Spanish conquistadors once feared these commanding plants, seeing them as monsters, while indigenous communities continue to regard them as guardians of the Andes. The mushrooms, emerging from the body of the cacti, function both as signs of decomposition and as symbols of resilience, extending the work’s ongoing dialogue between bodily vulnerability, ecological cycles, and rebirth.