IACOBINA’s work engages material value, memory, and transformation through the use of decommissioned currency and mixed media. Working primarily with shredded U.S. dollars and German Deutsche Marks, she reclaims fragments of economic systems once considered absolute and repositions them as physical matter.
Currency—designed to circulate, exchange, and disappear—becomes the foundation of the work. Shredded, layered, embedded, and suspended in resin, these remnants are preserved like fossils in amber. The process resists speed and disposability, asking the viewer to slow down and reconsider what is held, lost, or erased over time.
Her compositions draw from cartography, urban structure, and architectural rhythm. Cities, maps, and symbolic forms emerge from accumulated fragments of currency, reflecting systems of power, movement, and control. Through fragmentation and reconstruction, the work examines the tension between permanence and collapse, value and loss.
Raised between Romanian tradition and Western modernity, IACOBINA’s practice is shaped by inherited memory and contemporary urgency. She does not create to decorate, but to hold—preserving what has been shredded, overlooked, or deemed expendable, and giving it renewed presence and gravity.
BIO
Born in Romania in 1971, IACOBINA (Doina-Mihaela Iacob) is a mixed-media artist whose practice is rooted in material transformation and systems of value. She began her artistic career in the Romanian cartoon industry, where she developed strong technical discipline, precision, and narrative awareness.
She later mastered the Galle technique of reverse painting on glass, an exacting process that deepened her attention to detail, layering, and surface. In 2004, she emigrated to the United States with her family, bringing with her a visual language shaped by Eastern European tradition and contemporary Western culture.
Now based near Chicago, Illinois, IACOBINA has participated in numerous group exhibitions throughout the region. Her recent work is defined by the use of decommissioned currency—primarily shredded U.S. dollars and German Deutsche Marks—meticulously arranged and embedded into mixed-media compositions. Through this process, materials once designed for circulation and consumption are recontextualized as fixed, physical objects that reflect on memory, power, and material permanence.