Last week was all about exhibiting as part of a group show in Silesia region of Poland, an art project called Pasma Sztuki, where an extension of an earlier Warsaw project Kamien, Papier, Nożyce (Rock, Paper, Scissors) was exhibited. I joined about 50-60 other artists, who were showing in 3 different locations, showing some of my fairly new work and some of my fairly old fashion work, which somehow does still tie in with the idea of my current work.
During the presentation of works I was invited to show it felt to me like is a retrospective look at my fashion/art practice. Spanning from the winning International Young Fashion Entrepreneur design project Kierpcasy(adding a couture platform to traditionally flat polish mountain shoes) granted to me by British Council in 2009, through a winning garment from my 20 piece collection designed for Lexus Fashion Night 6 project in 2011, with sustainability at its core focused on using environmentally conscious textiles such as peace silk known as Ahimsa silk (ahiṃsā: Sanskrit for ‘nonviolence’), is a method of nonviolent silk breeding and harvesting), hand painted and manipulated into shape on the mannequin to produce minimal amount of textile offcuts and waste, to finally a most recent 2025 series of drawings of mothers-dancers in movement, a project from my collaboration with my mum and Cialo/Umysl contemporary dance foundation.
But more than anything, I appreciated being completely surrounded by incredibly welcoming, creative, warm people, who treated me as family, welcomed me to their homes and told me wonderful stories of their own creative journeys so even though I felt guilty for not writing my research paper while on the trip(there was absolutely zer time for that) I would call the time spent there absolutely priceless and with potential to evolve into something bigger in the future. And the strange combination of fashion, which seems to keep haunting me no matter how hard I try to escape it towards art, and art, seems like a new challenge I want to tackle and figue out whether there exists a possibility to combine the two…not mentioning mountain shoe orders which have suddenly appeared out of the blue.
The exhibition of my drawings at an old chapel of Sarny Zamek (The Sarna Castle) alongside fashion pieces and a hair cutting performance piece, all representing Paper, with the monumental space both overwhelming and complimenting the monochromatic calm of the pieces, I was unsure about it but finally decided I liked how it ended up being presented, and had to accept it, especially given the fact I couldn’t be there for the installation and it was only up to the curator to decide where they will go.
The absolute madness of putting a fashion show inside a goldmine, showing my hand painted Ahimsa silk piece and two metallic dresses hand crocheted and hand embroidered with recycled chandelier crystals and metallic leather sequins. Not sure what to think about this one, other than the fact it was great fun and a completely surreal experience. It was a great pleasure for me to be able to talk to people about my grandmother, her unbelievable skills and the fact these garments all hold a memory of her as a person, a craft master and an artist.
This trip was also something I deeply needed after an intense few months focused on my children and their lives, their shows, their achievements, their end of year shows, a multitude of overwhelmingly intense aspects of someone else’s life, which all seemed to feel like it was my responsibility to remember, to attend, to make sure everything was where it needed to be. In prolonged moments like these I completely forget who I am outside of the “mother of two” set up and need events like this one to decompress and find myself again, to find that I belong somewhere else outside my closest family.
Does that make me selfish? Maybe. About time us mothers stopped thinking embracing selflessness is the only virtue expected of us.