Portfolio — Mia Milgrom

Fibres

// stainless steel, burnt beech wood
// performance by Johana Šilarová

Chrudimka river, Pardubice

The site-specific installation focuses on exploring the Chrudimka River and the surrounding river landscape, addressing the themes of instability and regrowth. Collapse can be a destructive moment of faltering under pressure, but also of transformation and renewal. What forms of adaptation can arise from a fallen branch? The choice of materials refers both to traditional techniques of water impregnation and purification (burnt wood and charcoal), and to human infrastructures and transience.

2025
photos: Ondřej Teplý, J. Vostárek

Seep

// glass, used car oil, sand, metal marbles, clay, soil, cement clinker

The work extends a broader inquiry into deep time, treating the human era as a geological epoch that disrupts material formations built up over millions of years. Motor oil sits atop the layers, its surface tension gradually failing to hold its boundary, blurring into the materials beneath as a metaphor for containment and its collapse.

Seep is a speculative, geological core sample filled with gathered inorganic materials left to leak and stain through one another. The work stages a slow contamination between strata and changes over time.

2026

photos: photo: Tomasz Koszewnik / Contemporary Art Gallery in Opole

Ground Turns

// cast aluminum
a series of 5 reliefs sculptures (approx. 150 x 10 cm) placed in the city sidewalks and paths

M3 (Festlival of Art in Space), Prague

We stand on a surface whose depths we cannot see; the ground beneath our feet is a threshold to scale: the visible face of an invisible world whose structures support and permeate everything we build above them. Ground Turns brings these rhizomial networks to the surface as notation. Diagrams of themselves, the texture is a language that the soil speaks to its own roots. The enfoldment of scale, a gesture towards learning how to under-stand the ground’s conversation with itself.

There is a theorem in topology which tells us that a creature living on the surface of a sphere cannot determine, from its existence on that surface, the global shape of the space it inhabits. Of course, we know the planet’s shape through clever inferences and mathematical tricks, but on a human scale its curvature is far too gradual to be noticed in everyday life. We walk the ground, rarely thinking about what lies beneath the paths we trace, or which subterranean world will surface next like a forgotten dream. The cast metal pieces overturn this blindness like a ploughed field revealing the fertility of its underlayers: a bringing-up of deep structure into the threshold of the visible, a notation of the liminal geometries of the in-between.

To walk across them, to peer into their fractal depths, reveals overlooked infrastructures and performs a crossing to the underside of the ground. (text by Ash Faro)

2026

Prepositions (Under)

// stainless steel

Proluka, Prague

Prepositions (Under) works with the motif of interconnected scales, tracing continuities between microscopic encounters and vast branching constellations of events. The exposed root structure suggests an inner architecture, an underlying logic of connection that traverses both organic life and human-made infrastructures, an inverted perspective unusually surfacing – a permanent permeation of geo-biological layering usually concealed beneath the surface.
As the theory of scales tells us, the roots become more than merely a biological form. They reveal scale not as a framework for measuring the world but rather as a process through which worlds are continuously composed. A root tip probing the soil, the spread of a fungal network, the movement of resources across territories, the circulation of information through technical systems, each unfolds within and through others, collapsing any clear distinction between the intimate and the planetary, unsettling any assumption that the human scale can longer usefully serve as a natural point of orientation.
What emerges is an image of reality as a field of ongoing translation, where things travel across distances, where scales are nested, and where seemingly minor shifts ripple outward in unexpected ways. These exposed roots offer a glimpse into the hidden geographies of exchange. At once resilient and vulnerable, they point to the fragile conditions that allow complex systems to persist: a dense web of relations held together not by permanence but by continual becoming.

photos: Lukáš Procházka
2026

Sensing Free Fall 1 & 2

// stained wood, cast aluminum, glass marbles
130 x 30 x 30 cm

We measure the world from where we stand, yet every position produces its own horizon. What appears singular from a distance dissolves into countless centres, each carrying the density of its own world. The amber spheres become tiny universes: self-contained, weighty with possibility, each complete in itself while existing only through relation to others. Geomateriality blurs the distinction between object and history. Each sphere is a condensation of durations far exceeding human experience, a knot where planetary formation, mineral transformation, and cosmic time become present. Held in the hand, they collapse the immeasurable into the intimate.

Their accumulation speaks to the paradox of perspective, that vastness is composed of the infinitesimal, and that every whole is a constellation of partial views. The textured cast surface traces currents between these worlds, suggesting that connection is not the erasure of difference but the condition through which plurality becomes visible. The work proposes scale not as a fixed measure but as a way of seeing.

A marble becomes a planet; a field of marbles, a cosmos. Between the singular and the collective, the work proposes plurality as a generative condition, where innumerable worlds coexist without dissolving into one.

2026
photos: Tomasz Koszewnik / Contemporary Art Gallery in Opole

Birdwatchers

// steel, amaranth, basswood
GHMP Troja Château & Umění pro Město

Four sculptures placed in the orchard of the Troja Château are inspired by its baroque architecture and function not only as abstract sheltering bodies, but also as habitable bird houses and feeders.

2025
photos: Jan Hromádko

Undercurrents

// stainless steel, hand-blown glass, green micro-algae, honey combs, reed, silicone tube, water

// algae culture developed with Centrum Algatech

In Undercurrents natural filtration systems are used as a metaphor for the environmental contamination as well as for a personal process of absorbing grief. At its center are irregularly shaped tears made of glass and stainless steel, suspended in a site-specific installation that transforms the entire floor space into a construction site that reveals the various layers of the Earth through which water naturally filters. The installation is interwoven with the slow circulation of a green micro-algae that breaks down pollution, referring to symbiotic cycles, water crises and their associated physicality.

2024

Untitled 1

// stained beech wood, bronze, glass marble

2026

Eyes to Speak

// stainless steel, cement clinker
// 4K 2-channel video, 6'32'' (underwater footage from Oder river & animation in collaboration with Denisa Müllerová)

The project examines the industrialized shores of the Oder river. It reaches under the water surface, to the river bed, to place itself inside the map of interconnected relationships. Looking from down below, it attempts to reconcile external inquiry and a view from within - the metabolic world under the water level, but also inside the pipes, which function as a reminder of the grid-like infrastructures of transit, waste and circulation of goods, becomes partially uncovered, while acknowledging that the totality can never be known.

Exhibition text by Agnieszka Dela-Kropiowska

2025

The Water Drinks Me

// animation video for the Czech Philharmonic and Galerie Rudolfinum (supported by Lunchmeat Festival)

in collaboration with Denisa Mullerová

2024