Title: Scrape Offering
Collection: The Ascension Codex — Subseries: Make Me Pure Just Not Yet
Scrape Offering is a spiritual excavation rendered in gesture, grit, and ghosted memory. Created in 2012 during a pivotal phase of Maria Lankina’s early gestural abstraction (2010–2014), this 72 x 36 inch mixed media work stands as a ritual object—layered with intention, trauma, and a restless search for purity.
At first glance, the painting is a storm: monochromatic fields of white, black, grey, and flesh tones collide in erratic movement. But embedded within this chaos lie barely visible secrets—photographic gel transfers, most notably the eyes of a young woman, along with fragments of poetry and dreamlike figures: horses, birds, religious icons, burning landscapes. The more one looks, the more it reveals.
A vivid red splash streaks horizontally across the surface—a gesture that punctuates the painting like a ritual mark. Scratching, scraping, and distressed abrasion serve not just as technique, but as conceptual excavation—a way to strip the surface and expose what the conscious mind conceals.
The piece is part confession, part shield, part altar. It reflects a deep push-pull between revelation and resistance, where the act of painting becomes a form of emotional sacrifice. As part of The Ascension Codex, Scrape Offering enacts the Mythohuman belief that purification is rarely clean—it is violent, raw, and earned through surrender.

This painting was used as image input for the AI generation of Baroque Idol / Relay System (inv. DPP2023001), Harness Diagram / Body Blueprint (inv. DPP2023005), Ruin Carrier / Future Relic (inv. DPP2023006), Scale Armor / Pattern Firewall (inv. DPP2023012), Reluctant Muse / System Lag (inv. DPP2023014), and Oracle’s Gaze / Vestal Interface (inv. DPP2023011) in the Deities and Oddities. collection.