'In the Streets of Lisboa'

This was an exhibition I recently had in Colville Gallery, Salamanca. I was extremely excited about it because it has been my biggest show so far! The work was a reflection of my travels throughout Europe and my thoughts and emotions.


Artist Statement

There is impracticality about the word identity.

With the emphasis on ‘i’, a sense of loneliness is pronounced in its four-syllable dictation. Although it discusses the notion of what defines our characteristics, values and beliefs, does it in fact give us the authority to belong in a certain time or place? Does it give one the authority to live in a reality, or perhaps in fiction?

Influenced by my recent travels to Europe, Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa explores the earnest veracity of living in Lisbon. In his eccentric world of pros, I have become fascinated by how absence and loneliness provokes mark- making, with the obsession to locate a sense of belonging. Pessoa exclaims;

The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man

Through desperation to find both identity and reclaiming my Polish roots, this exhibition recollects memories in an allegorical sense to provide the viewer with a glimpse of the isolation I experienced on my trip and particularly art residency in July-October 2013. It discusses the idea of locating identity through imagination, or an imagined history. Searching for these answers in the streets of Portugal, France, Spain and Greece, I found myself yearning for my homeland.

As a first-generation child of Polish migrants, born in Tasmania, I am fascinated with the disconnection and connection to past histories. Illustrating historical narratives the sentiment and yearning behind the architectural landscape becomes a testimony to the ephemerality of tradition and lost lands. An Egyptian historian, Jan Assman, concluded in his essay Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,

The supply of knowledge in the cultural memory is characterized by a sharp distinction made between those who belong and those who don’t

This exhibition of self-portraits of my partner and I, epitomize something of a dream, perhaps the romance of estrangement and distance. As monochromatic, multi-layered etchings they aim to evoke emotion of the modern day migrant, after all, aren’t we all just desperately trying to belong?

            Completing the art residency on Skopelos Island in Greece (September 2013) left me with an overwhelming sensation of preserved culture. It gave me the opportunity to examine tradition in its raw form; where the importance of ceremony, customs and ritual has in a way been lost in our modern culture. Their foundations built on religion and piety as a way of finding identity became apparent to me, particularly in my research on Russian artist, Marc Chagall, who enlightened me with his connection between love and faith. He questioned;

Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection?

It was Chagall’s dedication to his Jewish faith, that through the words of God and through love, his paintings clearly expressed the decisive marriage between love, emotion and spirit. From seeing Chagall’s work in three different locations in Europe, my work has focused heavily on romanticism, with the intention to find meaning from the heart. The ‘Concept of Polishness’ has but been put aside, as to claim sovereignty over my own identity through sense of place.