Artist Statement

       I was raised in a Polish household with my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. I was at the center of a generational dialogue spanning 9 decades across wars, displacements, borders being incessantly redrawn, communism and collective pain, and the resuscitation of the individual.

My work, like the identity of many Slavs, is an amalgam of fragments of those before us, borrowed and collaged together in an ad hoc fashion. I work in an ad hoc manner across many media and scales to cut into a cultural past that is at once distant and remarkably close, in the hopes that some bizarre truth leaks out. It is speculative and interrogative: Where have we been, and where might we go? Folk traditions, paganism, migration and politics are recurring themes, as they act like characters in a great debate between then and now. Serious as this all sounds, my work holds a humorous undertone; a soft primal chuckle ripples across each piece, severing old ties to allow for new ones.

Future agricultural societies dance in bacchanalian rituals through fields riddled with potatoes and crisp packets of bygone days. A class gathers to celebrate the harvest of the new world growing from the bones of a ruined one. Warrioresses ride to battle atop endangered reptiles. Colorful chandeliers emit beams of lights to ward off the spirits of globalisation. Potatos continue their silent growth as people learn to till a poisoned land.

      These fragments, broken, rearranged, and sown together, serve as means to renegotiate the cultural identity and what we consider of value. Though I play with many cultural clichés (i.e. the potato or onion), my work is not about “being Polish”. Rather, I trace through my cultural history because histories lend an unusual glow with which to look at our present. Indeed, history seems to be repeating itself in the face of war even today. Old scars are back to the surface in vivid, thickly drawn lines, showing the lightning speed at which borders, lives, and what we consider of value can change.

      I hope, in my work, that people across borders or identities find bits of the commonplace everyday world sewn together in new ways. I hope they enter into the work like catching pieces of dialogues mid-sentence, sounding at once strange and familiar, distant but very near.