Bronze Fine Arts and Art Installation Design · 2025
Luck Art Installation
- A' Design Award 2025 Bronze Winner in Fine Arts and Art Installation Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: Maja Kirovska
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 43,299
- Verification code E804A273F6 · Verify this award
About Luck Art Installation
Luck is a conceptual art installation that combines photography, handcrafted and found objects, and video to ironically reconstruct the process of manufacturing luck. Through step by step photographs and encyclopedias displaying counterfeit four leaf clovers, the work questions authenticity, widely accepted cultural symbols, and the ways in which society simplifies and packages the idea of happiness. Rooted in personal memory, it uses familiar forms to provoke reflection through subtle irony and accessible visual language.
Maja Kirovska's Luck Art Installation engages the enduring human fascination with botanical anomaly and the symbolic potency of the four-leaf clover, positioning this humble plant within the elevated context of gallery presentation to invite reconsideration of chance, rarity, and the meanings we project onto natural variation. The work demonstrates sophisticated understanding of installation methodology, employing the formal vocabulary of contemporary museum display, modular pedestals supporting open volumes that transform books into exhibition armatures for pressed clover specimens, while photographic documentation mounted above chronicles the artist's engagement with living plants through a sequence of gestures that suggest harvesting, examination, and preservation. The compositional achievement lies in the work's ability to balance repetition with variation, establishing visual rhythm through the recurring elements of white pedestals, opened books, and verdant specimens while introducing enough diversity in pedestal heights, book orientations, clover arrangements, and leaf coloration to sustain viewer interest and reward prolonged observation. The chromatic sophistication emerges from severe restraint, the installation's predominantly neutral envelope of white walls, white pedestals, and cream-toned book pages serving to amplify the vibrant greens of the clover specimens, which become jewel-like focal points drawing the eye across the gallery space in a kind of visual treasure hunt that parallels the search for lucky four-leaf specimens in meadows and lawns. Thematically, the work appears to explore intersections between nature and culture, examining how humans categorize, collect, preserve, and assign meaning to botanical specimens, while the specific choice of clover invites reflection on luck, probability, genetic variation, and the human desire to find pattern and significance in randomness. The use of books as presentation substrate suggests knowledge systems, the accumulation and organization of information, the domestication of wild nature through scientific documentation and herbarium practices that stretch back centuries, while simultaneously proposing these volumes as sites where cultural meaning is literally pressed into natural matter. The photographic sequence depicting hands interacting with clover plants introduces process documentation characteristic of conceptual art traditions, revealing the labor and attention underlying the finished installation, humanizing the work through the visible presence of the artist's body engaging directly with plant material. One might observe resonances with Joseph Beuys' use of humble natural materials invested with symbolic weight, with the cabinet of curiosities tradition that arranged natural specimens for contemplation and wonder, with Agnes Denes' ecological interventions, and with the contemporary turn toward post-anthropocentric art practices that recenter attention on non-human life forms and interspecies relationships. The installation invites viewers to consider what makes certain botanical specimens "lucky," how rarity influences value perception, whether meaning resides in objects themselves or in cultural consensus, and how acts of collection and display transform ordinary plants into aesthetic objects worthy of sustained contemplation, ultimately proposing that attention itself, the careful looking and preservation that the work both enacts and encourages, might be where true value and "luck" reside.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- "Luck" is an conceptual art installation that combines photography, handcrafted objects, found objects, and video to represent ironically a process of manufacturing luck. Seven photographic steps demonstrate the process of creating fake four-leaf clovers and thirteen encyclopedias display dry counterfeit four-leaf clovers. This installation challenges perceptions of authenticity and luck by presenting "do-it-yourself" instructions for fabricating luck, critiquing the superficial pursuit of fortune.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Seven digital photographs (each 460 x 305 mm), thirteen books placed on thirteen pedestals (each pedestal approx. 900 x 300 x 300 mm), video displayed on monitor (dimensions variable). Overall installation dimensions are variable and depend on exhibition space.
- Tags
- irony in art, DIY, conceptual art, mixed media installation, digital photography, video art, contemporary art, participatory art, found objects, narrative art
- Production Technology
- The installation "Luck" combines conceptual and traditional methodologies. The pressed clovers were crafted by attaching a fourth leaf to trifoliate clovers, preserved as herbarium specimens. Encyclopedias, opened to random pages, create meaning by chance, highlighting the role of serendipity. A photographic sequence and video show the process of crafting these clovers.
- Design Challenge
- The main challenge was selecting and combining media to convey the concept clearly and accessibly. Balancing visual elements with the right amount of information was crucial. Professional equipment was used to ensure high-quality documentation of the crafting process. Although the technical execution was familiar, the focus was on clarity, coherence, and strong visual communication to prompt reflection.
- Project Duration
- The project started in December 2014 in Skopje and was first exhibited from December 24, 2014 to January 20, 2015 in the solo show "Cleanroom" at Gallery KO-RA, House of Culture "Koco Racin". It was later shown in 2015 at Gallery Karas, Zagreb, in 2016 at Gallery "Casa da Garrida", University Fernando Pessoa, Ponte de Lima, Portugal, and in 2021 at Beyond the Borders, Chang Kil-Hwan Art Museum, Gangneung, South Korea.
- Operation Flow
- Viewers interact by moving through the space: first encountering seven photographs that act as a step-by-step guide to fabricating a four-leaf clover by attaching a fourth leaf; then exploring encyclopedias opened on random pages, each with a set of pressed clovers; finally, watching a video that reveals the clovers are naturally trifoliate. The interaction is contemplative, guiding the viewer to question constructed beliefs and the superficial pursuit of fortune.
- Research
- This is a conceptual art research project grounded in personal memory and socio-cultural reflection. The objective was to explore how symbols of luck are created and socially accepted. Using visual analysis and memory, a handcrafted method was applied with tools for model- and jewelry-making. The process was documented via video and photography. The work reveals irony in superstition and false luck, using familiar media to make its message accessible and impactful.
- Inspiration
- Inspired by childhood memories of creating four-leaf clovers by hand during summer holidays in the countryside, when real ones could not be found, this project revisits a self-invented crafting process. It draws from personal experience to explore the widespread cultural symbolism of the four-leaf clover, and critically examines how society constructs and embraces ideas of luck, fortune, and superficial happiness.
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Photographer / Ana Lazarevska, Luck, 2014.
Image #2: Photographer / Creator Maja Kirovska, Luck, 2014.
Image #3: Photographer / Creator Maja Kirovska, Luck, 2014.
Image #4: Photographer / Creator Maja Kirovska, Luck, 2014.
Image #5: Photographer / Ana Lazarevska, Luck, 2014.
Video Credits: Videographer/ Maja Kirovska, Luck, 2014.