Biography
Eunika was born and raised in a small village near Trnava, Slovakia. At the age of twelve, she and her family went on a “vacation” to Yugoslavia, fleeing Czechoslovakia, which was then a communist block country. They spent the next four months in refugee camps and eventually immigrated to Canada.
Seven years later, after graduating from high school with honors, she packed her bags again and headed south to the Mississippi Delta following a tennis and cross-country running scholarship at Delta State University. She majored in both graphic arts and ceramics. During her senior year, under the guidance of her ceramic professor and mentor, she discovered her passion for clay – not only as an art form but also as a spiritual experience. On weekends, she and her mentor would go on clay digs in the Mississippi hills and work on their individual works of art.
After receiving her B.F.A., Eunika was accepted into a graduate program at the University of Memphis that allowed her to continue her study of ceramics. Her M.F.A. thesis intentions were to create beautifully thrown ceramic pieces. Instead, her final works included a mixture of raw and natural instillations created from her clay digs. These works provided an extensive collection of red-stained studio clothes that lead to the idea of using clay as a painting medium.
Today she still paints with Mississippi red clay that she digs up near Carrollton, MS. She also has added other clays and pigments to her palette. As a hiker and ultra-distance trail runner she has the means to find secluded areas with clay deposits. She runs with a small backpack and carries, along with her running/hiking gear, a small shovel, ziplock bags, and a camera to record her experiences. She has a collection of umber, sienna, and ochre clays from across America’s countryside. These clays provide the staining pigments that make up her art imagery. Through her art she tries to capture the passage of time and how it imprints our lives.
