ARTIST STATEMENT
I use shredded money because even after value is destroyed, memory remains.
My work explores the invisible systems that shape human lives: power, labor, inequality, desire, survival, and the ways value is assigned and controlled. Using decommissioned currency as both material and subject, I transform fragments of money into mixed-media works that investigate what remains after something society considers valuable has been broken apart.
Every fragment once belonged to a complete bill that traveled through unknown hands and unknown lives. It may have passed through the pockets of those struggling to survive or those who would never notice its absence. Money moves through every layer of human existence without judgment, carrying traces of ambition, fear, greed, generosity, hope, and love.
When currency is shredded, society declares it finished. Yet I am drawn to the idea that destruction does not erase experience. Even in fragments, these remnants continue to carry the weight of the lives and systems they once touched.
Through accumulation, layering, compression, and reconstruction, I rebuild what has been discarded into new forms. The work is not about wealth itself, but about memory, value, labor, inequality, and the invisible forces that shape human behavior.
At the center of my practice is a simple question: What survives when value is removed?
Every fragment was once part of something considered whole, powerful, and important. Reassembled, these remnants become portraits of systems rather than people—records of invisible power made visible through material transformation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Doina Iacob is a Romanian-born mixed-media artist whose work investigates value, power, memory, and the hidden structures that shape contemporary life. Working primarily with shredded currency, she transforms decommissioned money into dimensional works that challenge conventional ideas of worth, permanence, and meaning.
Born in Romania in 1971, Iacob developed her artistic foundation through drawing, painting, and decorative arts before immigrating to the United States in 2004. Her artistic background includes traditional painting, glass decoration, and mixed-media experimentation, all of which inform her current practice.
Her ongoing body of work, Portraits of Invisible Power, examines the mechanisms through which value is created, concentrated, distributed, and perceived. By reconstructing shredded currency into layered compositions and physical structures, she creates works that function simultaneously as objects, archives, and social commentary.
© Doina Iacob