Artist Statement
With respect to the bodies of others as well as with respect to my own I have no way of knowing the human body other then by living it which means to assume responsibility for the drama that flows through me and to merge my identity to it.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
My work explores relationships between the body and the spaces around it. I am interested in the body and its location at the boundaries of culture and biology. I work in various media, including drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance, incorporating video projection and sound.
Recurring motifs appear in my work around notions of trace, erasure, and disappearance. I position human body outside time or defined space. The way I think about the surrounding space is reflected in my interest in the act of drawing, as the impossible act of outlining the world. Drawn marks are like speech: they attempt and fail. Yet in this trial there is a mark or a trace left, which testifies to the intensity of a moment in time. The marks – intervals of time - speak of the presence of body, recalling states of endurance. Since the 1990s I made hundreds of drawings using ink, pencil, charcoal or mixed-media on paper, trying to define the relationship between the self and the world. The act of drawing remains often a point of departure for my installation and performance-based projects. At times it also becomes a point of arrival and conclusion. It is perhaps an attempt to come closer to a drawn mark as suggestive and transcending both the maker and the subject: my body.
In most recent series of drawings made with pencil, charcoal, pigment and rubber latex on Japanese rice paper (Leukos, 2005-06), the body gradually acquires sculptural properties. Thanks to the three-dimensional quality of rubber latex, this skin-like material, itself fragile and prone to changes in color and structure over time, reflects, just like paper, the fragility and the impermanence of our body. Exploring the solitary human figure, I focus on the quality of skin that has properties similar to paper or latex, which easily tears apart, decays, becomes brittle over time. The body bears traces of events, marks and stains that connote time. The human silhouette in my drawings exists beyond its gender, yet it is also autobiographical since I use my own body and its charcoal imprint on the paper. “Leukos” in ancient Greek means “early morning light” and is a title for a series of drawings and installations which connote a beginning and rebirth.
During 2001 I have developed a series of small-scale drawings with pencil, crayon, milk, crème, and hair-dye. Milk Series are miniatures representing possible ideas for large-scale sculptures or performances, but they also function as drawings. Created on an aged paper or in found notebooks, they assume the quality of paper as an equal subject matter with the images depicted, focusing on how the paper changes in color and in structure, becoming similar to human skin, fragile and humble. My interest in the direct use or in the referencing bodily fluids results from an ongoing investigation of fluidity as concept, physical and ontological. Fluids have no boundaries and as such they connote the lack of boundaries between the self, the body and the world.
In Ennoia (Bird), 2000 and Pandora’s Belly, also 2000, using pencil and collage on long, body-like sized Indian and Japanese rice papers I depict stretched or curled up naked figures, mainly female torsos, in either frontal, or profile views. Each drawing becomes a landscape of human body, which can be viewed on the wall or spread on the ground or on a table. The figures presented frontally open themselves to the gaze, sometimes having their belly open like a flower, with symbolic representation of the inner organs. Stretched figures viewed from profile are confined within the narrow space of the paper, as if asleep. In their motionlessness they resemble "Dead Christ" by Hans Holbein.
My installations and performances are comprised of long-term actions in evolving states and endurance, often for long periods of time. For example, I immerse myself in water for multiple hours, or devise repetitive sequences that are seen by the audience in video projection. During these repetitive actions, I introduce subtle changes that suggest states of being outside time, where there is no beginning, middle, or end.
In White Chalice (Ennoia) a video image of my immersion inside the polypropylene and fiberglass chalice is projected back into the water filling the sculpture. Resembling a sarcophagus, plaster/metal Lethe Room contains hundreds of layers of newsprint paper. A motor underneath moves a hidden base up and down, in a rhythm resembling breathing. At times I lie quietly inside. I capture my own action from an aerial or elevated viewpoint to addresses the concept of landscape and ground and the ontological tension between the body and the surfaces of skin, water, paper, stone and earth.
Intervals are drawing landscapes, usually created outdoors, which others may enter and fill with their own drawn marks, e.g. Leukos. This series of installations explores physical properties of the act of drawing and its performative and sculptural qualities. In my recent installation Phlegethon-Milczenie, books printed before the Second World War serve as objects on which I crawl and draw, outlining the world around my body with my eyes purposefully closed.
Scheduled at The Center of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko, Poland (2007), Leukos/Dagian. Internal Conversations, is a project in which I will carve a narrow oval space for my curled-up body in a large-scale limestone block. Suspended from above the sculpture, a video camera and sound recording system will register this long-term process. Combined with sequences showing my body lying inside the recess sculpted in the stone, the virtual and sonic memory of the carving will become part of the sculpture itself.