STUDY STATEMENT

OLGA SZYNKARCZUK

UNIT 1: STUDY STATEMENT

(A living document: Version 3, 12 February 2026)

Mothercore: Reclaiming Art from Intuitive Chaos

1. Working Title

Mothercore: Reclaiming Art from Intuitive Chaos

“You can’t be a Good Artist and a Good Mother.”(Yes, We Exist. Artist-Mothers Share Their Stories., 2018)

This cultural cliché underpins my inquiry. My practice begins by destabilising this binary and asking:

How does motherhood alter the ontology of the artist?
How does art-making alter the cultural image of the mother?

As articulated in Life Lessons: Motherhood and Art:

“What does Motherhood do, to change the idea we have of what an artist is? What does being an artist do to change the idea of what a mother is?” (Yes, We Exist. Artist-Mothers Share Their Stories., 2018)

My project interrogates invisibility, care, fragmentation, and labour, asking whether the maternal capacity to care – historically undervalued and domestically contained – can be reframed as a radical, creative and ecological force.

“Mothers Care More” functions not as sentiment, but as proposition. If maternal care has been structurally marginalised, can its revaluation offer a model for collective responsibility toward Mother Earth?

2. Aims

My primary aim is to understand myself as a mother-artist-carer operating within a contemporary art world that continues to privilege uninterrupted production, heroic singularity, and market coherence. I seek to expose and analyse the fractures between maternal time and artistic time.

Motherhood radically altered my perception of duration, concentration and physical autonomy. After the birth of my second child, I experienced fragmentation not metaphorically but materially – interrupted thought, sleeplessness, emotional instability, and invisibility. This fracture between “artist-self” and “mother-self” became the generative site of inquiry.

In Louise Bourgeois Precious Liquids, welded in steel over the entrance to its interior is an inscription that says:

“Art is a guarantee of sanity.”(Bourgeois, 1993)

For me, this statement is not rhetorical. It is structural. Art-making operates as survival, regulation and psychic reconstruction.

Simultaneously, I aim to develop a materially conscious, sustainable practice that reclaims discarded objects – particularly domestic fridge doors – as surfaces of emotional and political expression. The refrigerator, a domestic containment device, becomes inverted: detached, sliced, opened, sanded, painted on the interior, transformed from storage into exposure.

The maternal ability to care and the environmental necessity to care converge. Care becomes both personal and planetary.

Objectives

To conduct practice-as-research through sustained studio experimentation.
To analyse generational female experience, particularly through my grandmother’s sewing practice and my own past fashion brand.
To situate my work within feminist, psychoanalytic and environmental discourse.
To interrogate migration and dual identity (Polish–British) as embodied displacement.
To engage Jungian therapy as a reflective methodology.
To critically assess failure (e.g., exhibition outcomes) as epistemological material.
To experiment across painting, sewing, sculpture, installation, digital documentation.
To examine maternal mental health decline and the role of creative movement as stabilising structure.
To maintain sustained engagement: exhibitions (2–3 per month), daily reading, blogging, documentation.

These objectives remain fluid. As I wrote in my earlier reflections, I resist fixing my aims prematurely. Research unfolds through making.

3. Context

Personal Context: Fragmentation as Method

Motherhood reorganised my subjectivity. I felt lonely, invisible, expected to hold everything together. I feared losing the artist entirely.

Virginia Woolf argues for “a room of one’s own” (2015), yet maternal reality destabilises spatial autonomy. Time becomes fragmented, cyclical, and negotiated. Julia Phillips (2023) describes motherhood as a condition of fractured duration, saturated with guilt and self-discipline.

This fragmentation is not incidental – it has become methodological.

I work in bursts. I sew lamps until 3am. I paint quickly between interruptions. I sand fridge doors in silence. I destroy, reconstruct, layer, tear, hand stitch. Anger becomes material.

Rather than resisting chaos, I allow it to structure form.

Theoretical Context

Freud positioned motherhood as a developmental endpoint. “By the time a woman is thirty, Freud claimed, her psyche ‘has taken up his final positions, and. . . there are no paths open to her for further development’ “(Sontag, 2012, cited in Phillips, 2023, p. 5) This historical framing lingers culturally — motherhood as conclusion, closure, dissolution of ambition. I question this model by stating: Fuck you, Freud, becoming a mother is just the beginning.

Susan Sontag (2012 cited in Phillips) reflects on visibility and discipline; the maternal subject is rendered hyper-visible in labour yet invisible in authorship. Through my work I would like to engage this tension.

Jungian psychoanalysis informs my inquiry into projection, shadow, anger, fragmentation. Therapy becomes a reflective structure rather than confession.

Rothko’s understanding of colour as an emotional field – not decorative surface – resonates with my five fridge doors collage (Mothercore). His insistence that painting carries “tragedy, ecstasy and doom” (Rothko, 2017) aligns with my investment in emotional magnitude.

Pina Bausch stated:

“I’m not interested in how people move, but what moves them.”(What moves me, no date)

This statement is central. My collaboration with dancers, the reworking of paper lamps into pregnant torsos, and embodied workshop processes are concerned not with choreography but with emotional propulsion — grief, exhaustion, desire, rebellion.

Louise Bourgeois emphasised self-knowledge:

“Know yourself in order to be happy.”(Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (2008), 2025)

This directive underpins my research aim. Self-knowledge is neither indulgent nor private; it is structurally political when the self has been historically marginalised.

Historical and Contemporary Context

My practice is currently situated in dialogue with:

Louise Bourgeois – psychoanalytic materiality, repetition, repair.
Magdalena Abakanowicz – textile monumentality, collective bodies.
Jenny Saville / Celia Paul – embodied female presence.
Lee Krasner – working within patriarchal shadow structures.
Joanna Fluder – embodied feminist painting.
Do Ho Suh – domestic architecture, displacement, interior/exterior inversion.
Pina Bausch – emotional movement, repetition, rawness.
Nigerian Modernism – hybridity, spiritual and political negotiation.

These artists confront displacement, fragility, monumentality, invisibility — conditions that also structure maternal life.

This is obviously an initial plan, but I am planning to expand on it by researching additional artists and philosophers.

Originality and Contribution

My originality lies in transforming constraint into epistemology.

Motherhood fragments time. Rather than mimicking uninterrupted studio production, I formalise interruption as compositional logic.

Discarded fridge doors become sculptural painting supports. Their industrial interior surfaces hold abstraction born of anger, exhaustion and longing. They are domestic relics turned outward.

Paper lamps become glowing pregnant torsos — fragile, suspended, rotating. They embody tension between vulnerability and luminosity.

The MOTHERCORE fridge collages accumulate rage and repair.
The MOTHERLAMP installations suspend fragility.
The Pouring Paint Triptych stages transformation across female archetypes.

Failure becomes research. A poorly received exhibition revealed my prioritisation of quantity over depth. The anger I felt did not end the work; it redirected it.

Chaos becomes clarity not by elimination, but by confrontation.

4. Methodology

My methodology is structured but responsive:

Exhibition research (minimum 2–3 monthly)
Blog as critical reflection archive
Photography/video documentation
Artist interviews
Daily bibliography engagement
Workshop participation (wood, metal, print, digital)
Studio practice 3–4 days weekly
Three-week review blocks
Collaborative embodied workshops

Practice functions as research site, therapy space, laboratory and testing ground.

Mistakes are logged. Emotional reactions are analysed. Process is foregrounded as epistemic tool.

5. Outcomes

Through the duration of the course I aim to:

Produce a materially and conceptually coherent body of work.
Situate my practice clearly within feminist and environmental discourse.
Deepen technical mastery across mediums.
Establish sustainability as ethical framework.
Engage residencies and exhibitions aligned with this research.
Clarify my position within contemporary maternal discourse.

The core objective remains self-knowledge — not as narcissism but as resistance to erasure.

As Bourgeois reminds us:

“Know yourself in order to be happy.”(Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (2008), 2025)

For a mother-artist negotiating fragmentation, this becomes both a survival strategy and artistic manifesto.

6: Work Plan

UNIT 1 – 60 Week Work Plan

Weeks	Exhibitions (Attend / Exhibit)	Studio Practice & Research	Professional Development
1–3	Zachęta: Śluz (Warsaw) Fringe Warsaw (Norblin Factory) Body/Mind Festival (Studio Theatre)	Finalise 20+ works; daily drawing with dancers; film Between Movement and Breathing; reading Look at My Ugly Face, Bodies	Sponsorship, framing, install planning, invitations; begin structured blog documentation
4–6	V&A East Storehouse; Frieze London; Whitechapel pop-up	Sustainable surface experiments (recycled fridge doors); life drawing; early oil/acrylic tests	Rapid exhibition response; reflection on quality vs quantity; material problem-solving
7–9	Norblin exhibition; Body/Mind; Two Temple Place; Bomb Factory Finalist	Develop MOTHERCORE & MOTHERLAMP; sculptural transformation of failed works; rotating mechanisms	Installation logistics; workshop facilitation; spatial planning; reflection on sales failure
10–12	Freedom of Speech (Holborn); Saatchi; Milano Pride House	Acrylic canvas tests; therapy-informed abstraction; sky/oil fridge tests; collaborative drawings	Large-scale install troubleshooting; Study Statement writing; bibliography development
13–15	Tate (Rothko); Sadler’s Wells; St Gabriel’s tests	Pouring Paint Triptych (Maiden/Mother/Crone); lamp testing; surface experimentation	Zotero system; Unit 1 assessment preparation
15–18	Tate: Performer & Participant; Pina Bausch; Quartet exhibition; RA submission	Complete Unit 1 works; refine Triptych; develop clouds/dancer imagery; scale lamps	RA application; independent install strategy; interim show prep
19–22	Interim Show; Carl Freedman Gallery	3D workshops (wood, metal, print, digital); evaluate medium direction	Peer dialogue; medium selection for practice direction
23–26	Southbank Centre; gallery research	Structured studio system (4 days making); sewing & recycled textiles; intergenerational craft integration	Time management; curatorial experimentation
27–30	London gallery research	Expand textile + fridge + painting synthesis; installation display strategies	Develop exhibition strategy & future positioning
31–60	Continuous exhibition research	Consolidate sculptural-installation language; refine material coherence	Long-term applications; sustained reflective practice via blog