Unit 1 Assessment: Curating My Blog
This page will demonstrate how I have fully met the Level 7 Assessment criteria for my MA Fine Art: Digital, Unit 1 Assessment – involving criteria for Enquiry, Process and Knowledge and Communication.
Learning Outcome 1:
Formulate, describe and implement a challenging and self-directed programme of study, relating to your Study Statement.
(Assessment Criteria: Enquiry)
My programme of study grows out of something raw and unresolved in me. Mothercore: Reclaiming Art from Intuitive Chaos is not just a title, it is the name I have given to the fracture I live inside. Since becoming a mother, I have felt split in two: artist and carer, ambition and tenderness, rage and devotion. I keep hearing the quiet cultural whisper that you cannot be both a “good artist” and a “good mother.” Instead of trying to silence that voice politely, I push back against it. I work directly inside that tension. I let it generate the work.
This programme is self-directed because it has to be. It is built from lived experience: sleeplessness, interruption, disappearing into care, the slow erosion of self, the shock of migration, the surge of anger, and the overwhelming capacity to love. These are not themes I have chosen for intellectual interest – they are the air I breathe. When I ask how motherhood alters the artist, I am asking what has happened to me. When I ask how art-making reshapes the image of the mother, I am asking whether I can rebuild myself through practice.
The challenge I have set myself is to stay with this fracture and not retreat into something safer. I work across drawing, sculpture, painting, sewing, installation and digital documentation because no single medium is large enough to hold what I am trying to process. I drag discarded fridge doors into the studio: heavy, cold, domestic objects that once sealed things inside — and I cut them open. I sand them. I paint into their interiors. The invisible but central everyday object, which once contained food and routine becomes a surface for anger, grief and colour. Storage becomes exposure.
Alongside the MOTHERCORE fridge collages, I am continuing to build MOTHERLAMP forms: fragile glowing bodies that resemble pregnant torsos, suspended and vulnerable. At the same time, I am beginning the Pouring Paint Triptych: Maiden/Mother/Crone. These strands run in parallel, like different emotional registers of the same story. Rage sits next to repair. Fragility sits next to endurance. Archetype sits next to autobiography.
The research behind this work matters to me, but it is never abstract. I read Freud and feel the weight of the historical idea that motherhood is a closing down. I turn to feminist artists and writers because I recognise myself in the struggle for visibility. While reaserching I think about my maternal grandmother’s neurosis and my paternal grandmother’s depression, the mental health of women from post-war communist patriarchal Eastern Europe. These thoughts, the theory, do not lead the work; the studio does. I make first. I feel first. I process materially and maternally. Only afterwards do I recognise the intellectual threads.
I have stopped trying to impose neat resolutions on my practice. I no longer aim for coherence that erases the mess. Fragmentation is not a problem to solve — it is the condition of my life. So it becomes the structure of the work. I paint in bursts between interruptions. I sew late at night. I build installations around the rhythms of childcare. Chaos is not something I escape from; it is something I shape. It is the way I refuse to disappear.
As this is Work in Progress and my Study Statement is a living document, I am amending my ideas, even in recent days, adding blog posts including additional research about displaced migrant mothers, seeking for the connection through a shared experience of not having my family around the corner when struggling as a new mother, not having one steady place I could call home. I continue my research and watch the changes in my work, evolving from Sep 2025 exhibition of drawings, during which the highlight was my curated visit from mental health hospital patients. The drawings gradually turned from dissapointment and anger into lamps of hope, and now a potential collaboration with migrant new mothers. Below I am relooking at my very first post and comparing it to the one of the most recent ones.
REFUGEE MOTHERS, MOTHER MENTAL HEALTH – FURTHER RESEARCH AND CONVERSATIONS
Learning Outcome 2:
Implement appropriate working methods for building an independent and effective self-organisation that enables the critical engagement with practice-based research.
(Assessment Criteria: Process)
To support this enquiry, I have implemented a structured but responsive working system. My 60-week work plan operates as a scaffold, balancing studio production, contextual research, professional development and reflective practice.
I commit to:
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Studio practice 3–4 days per week.
IDEA AFTER LAYERS EXHIBITION – MAKING A PAPER SCULPTURE/LAMP FROM DRAWINGS
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Visiting 2–3 exhibitions per month to contextualise my practice
JOANNA FLUDER ŚLUZ EXHIBITION @ ZACHĘTA GALLERY WARSAW 31.08.25
- Running as a form of meditation, keeping ,entally and physically healthy and giving myself space to come up with ideas
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Maintaining a daily reading/watching documentaries/going to concerts/workshops habit and expanding a sustained bibliography.
WORKING ON STUDY STATEMENT – BOOK „BABY ON THE FIRE ESCAPE”/MONUMENTAL WORKS BY DE CHRISTO, @NESPOON
ENVIRONMENT AND DESTRUCTION:TECHNOLOGY AS CARE WORKSHOP BY THE C SCHOOL AT CSM
PINA BAUSCH SWEET MAMBO AND LOUISE BOURGEOIS ON SEWING AS REPAIR
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Using a structured blog as a critical reflection archive.
- Maintaining regular weekly therapy sessions as a way to better understand myself and the process I am going through
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Documenting process through photography and video.
- Applying to various Open Calls, organising Workshops, Exhibitions and responding Yes to most opportunities to keep myself motivated, inspired and visible
TWO TEMPLE PLACE WORKSHOP WITH ROYAL OPERA’S LARA TURK AND MY VIOLINIST HUSBAND
PARTICIPATING IN: MILAN PRIDE HOUSE WINTER OLYMPICS VIDEO 04.01.26 – 17.01.26, LAUNCH: 14.02.25
This structure is essential because maternal time is fragmented and cyclical. Rather than waiting for uninterrupted “ideal” studio conditions, I formalise interruption as compositional logic. I work in bursts. I log emotional responses. I analyse failure — including exhibition outcomes — as epistemological material rather than personal defeat.
Professional development is embedded within the research process. Applications (e.g. Lethaby Gallery, RA Summer 2026 submission), residency research and exhibition participation (Fringe Warsaw, The Good Rice, Lincoln, Window Wonderland, Milan 2026 Olympics Pride House, solitude|dance|hygge) function as testing grounds for installation strategy, spatial logic and conceptual coherence. Workshop participation such as Two Temple Place Workshop festival, Environment and Destrudion: Technology as Care by C School (ideally: painting, wood, metal, print, robotics) expands technical fluency and prevents medium stagnation. This integrated approach enables independence: I am not reliant on external structure but generate my own framework for accountability.
Self-organisation, therefore, is not administrative alone — it is methodological. It allows me to critically engage with my practice rather than react emotionally or intuitively without reflection.
Learning Outcome 3:
Communicate a critical understanding of your developing practice.
(Assessment Criteria: Knowledge, Communication)
My practice has developed directly from lived experience. Motherhood fragmented my time and concentration, and instead of resisting that, I began allowing interruption and constraint to shape how I work. Fragmentation is no longer something I apologise for — it has become part of my method.
I paint on discarded fridge doors because they already hold the history of domestic labour. The abstraction that emerges often carries exhaustion or anger — emotions that are rarely acknowledged in maternal narratives. My paper lamps resemble pregnant torsos: fragile but luminous. They embody the tension I experience between vulnerability and strength.
I think about anger as a response to invisibility, and care as labour rather than sentiment. Through material processes — sanding, cutting, stitching, layering — I explore ideas of rupture, repair and survival. I am becoming more aware of when quantity overtakes depth, and I am learning to slow down to maintain coherence between concept, material and installation.
I understand my work as operating between psychoanalytic materiality and feminist critique. Anger is not expressive gesture alone — it is structural response to invisibility. Care is not sentiment — it is repositioned as ecological and political force. By reframing maternal labour as radical capacity rather than private sacrifice, I situate my work within contemporary maternal discourse and environmental ethics.
Recently, I have been considering how my lamp-making process — which combines drawing, shaping and sewing — could extend beyond my studio. I want to develop workshops for refugee mothers experiencing displacement and loss of home. The act of constructing something that physically holds light feels symbolic of rebuilding identity and safety. This reflects my understanding of practice as both personal and collective repair.
As a Polish–British artist and mother, I recognise that reflecting on my own experience is not self-indulgent but necessary. The chaos in my work is not accidental; it reflects lived reality and is deliberately embedded within my material choices and visual language and I want to continue looking for a way to clearly communicate that message throughout my MA Fine Art: Digital course.
MONUMENTAL LAMPS IDEA: TO WORK WITH REFUGEE WOMEN-MOTHERS AND MENTAL HOSPITAL DAY WARD PATIENTS