Window Wonderland 2025 Proposal
Freedom of Speech
Artist: Olga Szynkarczuk
MA Fine Arts: Digital, Central Saint Martins, UAL
Concept Overview
For Window Wonderland 2025 and the theme “Freedom of Speech”, this installation explores the unspoken invisibility that affects many women artists when they become mothers. It gives sculptural, luminous, and symbolic voice to their often-silenced experiences, combining kinetic paper forms, reclaimed materials, and layered colour.
The work asks how an artist’s identity is reshaped through motherhood: stretched, exhausted, temporarily hidden, yet ultimately re-emerging with a stronger, fiercer core.
Symbolism of Forms
Paper Lamps: the Exterior Body of the Mother-Artist
The suspended glowing paper lamps, shaped like abstract pregnant bellies – symbolise the outer surface of the mother-artist. Their materiality evokes:
- thin, stretched skin
- wrinkles and transparency
- wear and tear
- small rips, folds, hand-stitched repairs,
- loose threads hanging from seams
This delicate exterior speaks to the pressures, exhaustion, fragility, and physical stretching that motherhood inscribes on the body — and on the artist’s sense of self. They glow softly from within, revealing how close the inner world is to the surface: almost visible, almost breaking through.
The lamps are lit by pulsing Astera lights, imitating the mother’s heartbeat – a reminder that beneath the delicate exterior lies constant emotional and physical labour.
The Fridge-Door Paintings – the Inner Core
In contrast, the paintings on reclaimed fridge doors represent the interior of the mother-artist: tough, vibrant, indestructible.
Reclaimed fridge doors – objects once essential, then discarded and forgotten – act as metaphors for mother-artists themselves, who often “disappear” from the public eye when caring responsibilities dominate their time.
On these doors, the painted surfaces are:
- bright, saturated, confrontational in colour
- durable and materially strong
- rich with layers and experiences
- fearless in tone,
- unconcerned with external judgement
The fridge doors – heavy, solid, unapologetic – counterbalance the fragility of the lamps. Together they assert:
the artist’s core does not weaken through disappearance; it becomes more powerful.
Relation to ‘Freedom of Speech’
Here, “Freedom of Speech” becomes the freedom to remain visible, to take up cultural space, and to express artistic identity even when systems, institutions, or expectations attempt to silence or sideline mother-artists.
The installation challenges this structural muting by presenting:
- a fragile exterior that refuses to collapse
- a strong interior that refuses to be hidden.
It makes visible what is usually unseen – the emotional labour, the resilience, and the artistic force of mothers in the creative industries.
Connection to Reclaiming Grace
The proposal extends ideas from Reclaiming Grace, created with Royal Ballet First Artist and mother of three Lara Turk. That project revealed the overlapping identities, endurance, and emotional negotiations of those who balance motherhood with artistic careers.
This installation translates those ideas into sculptural, static-yet-living forms: pulsing, rotating, glowing with the tension between vulnerability and strength.
Installation Description
- Large suspended paper lamps shaped like pregnant bellies, glowing with internal heartbeat-like light.
- Delicate surfaces marked by rips, stretched textures, stitches, and dangling threads to evoke the outer world of the mother-artist.
- Internal Astera lamps pulsing like a heartbeat, connecting breath, body, and endurance.
- Rotating rainbow-coloured ribbons, referencing folk dance, play, and cultural vitality.
- Reclaimed fridge doors transformed into bold, vibrant sculptural paintings, symbolising inner strength and resilience.
- Adaptable layouts for Bomb Factory Marylebone, Holborn, and Hogarth Road street-length window displays.
At night, the windows become glowing beacons of persistence and renewal.
By day, the colours and textures speak clearly about identity, resilience, and the right to be seen.
This installation asserts that motherhood is not an erasure, but a transformation – one that may stretch, mark, or challenge the artist, but ultimately reveals an inner core that is brighter, stronger, and more fearless than before.
Freedom of Speech means freedom to re-emerge.
Freedom to be visible again.
Freedom to speak through body, material, colour, and light.
I had a thought today while working on another massive fridge door, painting it red and brown and a bit of orange that I might be going a bit crazy. The realisation came after yesterday’s conversation with the delivery company, a man’s reaction when I told him I need to transport some paintings. He was like: “Paintings, oh this is very expensive and fragile. You know we need to protect the paintings and everything?” and then I said “well they’re on discarded fridge doors” and he just burst out laughing.
And then he said: “what kind of a crazy idea is this?!? OK if it’s fridge doors then it’s just drawing on trash so it’s not gonna be expensive at all” And just the sort of way he said that this made me think: am I just completely mad by thinking I can create art by painting on trash and that people are just gonna think I’m insane and laugh at me and be like what the hell is she doing so yeah, this is the thought I had while working on this piece for Window Wonderland submission called Freedom of Speech. I’m going mad probably I’m not sure but I am loving this process of splashing some paint on the brush splashing that on some plastic previously sanded and washed I don’t know it feels quite freeing and liberating and fun.
Just have to make it harder for myself I’m leaning above the fridge door, which is lying on the floor painting the biggest thing I’ve ever painted before, it’s 80cm by 150cm fridge door and it’s a 1/5 part of a 2 x 3 m massive collage of fridge doors. I am terrified. I don’t know what it’s gonna be. I’m terrified of the scale, of the paint, of the brush. I’m sort of terrified of everything and I don’t really know why I’m doing this. It’s just a bit overwhelming also Painting something abstract which I normally don’t do that’s why I really have no idea where this is going or what’s going to happen I don’t even know why I decided to do this.
But now that I’ve started I don’t know if I can stop. I’m just sort of in the middle of this massive Idea massive project and it’s just kind of consuming me and even though I constantly think why what for what’s the point of this this making any sense I just kind of keep going
Well now it’s finished, I just submitted it. Freaking out but there is nothing I can do at this stage.
I FIND THE DIFFERENT STAGES OF GETTING TO THE FINAL VERSION QUITE HILLARIOUS SO I’M SHARING THEM HERE:
