General Feedback
You say: ‘Fragmentation is not a problem to solve — it is the condition of my life. So it becomes the structure of the work.’
Being an artist is hard. Finding the time to be an artist is hard. When you add being a parent to this it changes everything. A lot of artists use their art as an escape route, a way to forget their everyday problems and worries. But you’ve taken the brave route of focusing on your mental anguish in the art you produce. There is no escape for you.
Is it worth it? Only you can decide. But when you manage to paint such a powerful piece as Matrescense you’re obviously doing something right. But then of course you worry about the effect this painting might have on your children. Again, there is no escape for you.
We wonder how you feel showing your Mother Core piece in different situations. How did the locations affect how you saw the work? Particularly the church. It looks like it belongs there as a piece of religious art. Do you mind if viewers see it as something completely different from what you intended?
Did you see Mother Core 1/2/3/4/5 as different pieces to start with or did you always imagine turning them into one bigger and magnificent piece.
Now you’ve shown it on a few occasion is it time to rest it? What is more important to you? Selling the individual piece or finding a permanent home where lots of people can see the whole thing?
Fridges hold more than just a history of domestic labour. They hold a history of a lifetime of use. They see births and deaths. Arrivals and departures, Changing view on environmental and food scarcity. Periods of poverty and riches. Without them the world would waste even more food than we do now. Consider ways to extend this work, could the doors be combined into a more sculptural form, even a modular system that allows a variety of forms?
To what extent could you retreat, retreat from the energetic drive to show work?
Is there value in focusing in on your own making process?
sit with it
take time
reflect
You are clearly an amazing problem solver (the Vecna costume is simply stunning!) but enjoy the freedom you have on this course
discover what the reasons are for your work
dig deep
give yourself permission to engage in the freedom you have
— this will give you greater depth and build a broader portfolio of work
but it takes time and even in the fragmentation, you have time, even fragments of time can combine over time to make time!
Added extra after a chat during the Low Residency — these are just notes for you to have a reflect on:
Started with frustration about getting access to metal work to make a lamp that goes up and down (after coding workshop with Felix)
But actually interested in how people responded to the interim show installation – different readings including seeing the red pouring paint on the fridge door as pouring blood from female body
But the work comes from generations of women
Worked with clothes and her grandmother
Certain guilt after she died in 2016 at 74 – 2 years after her son born and made a life away from wider family
Mother film maker – made films of grandmother
Grandmother made a quilt –
Great grandmother also creative – made clothes shoes etc
Told dream to daughter she drew it
Is there something in the generations
A story – a way to engage with the guilt
Reframe and redeem the guilt
(collaborating with daughter etc)
Something about light and movement
Autoethnography
maybe look at female artists who have considered generations
THIS IS A VERY CHAOTIC RECORDING OF MY CONVERSATION WITH JONATHAN ON THE FINAL DAY OF THE EXHIBITION, WHICH I AM YET STILL TO ORGANISE, FOR NOW IT’S MY VOICE RECORDED AND PUT INTO NOTES ON MY PHONE SO VERY CHAOTIC
So after a two hour talk with Jonathan having an enlightenment moment I decided to make a voice memo recording of this to make sure I don’t forget what I want to do next. This might or might not be my PhD proposal idea. It’s about the interconnectedness between the women in my family, starting with my great grandmother and her experience coming from town called Dworzec (currently Belarus) to Poland and having to support the entire family with her tailoring and millinery business (3 siblings at university, 3 daughters). My grandmother was the only one who inherited the talent and passion but mentally was too scarred by life, neurotic and depressed to continue my great grandmother‘s business. Grandma wanted to be a geologist but was unable to attend university because my great grandmother had her own business (“In 1950–1960s Poland, private-owned businesses were heavily restricted and viewed with ideological hostility, severely limiting the ability of their owners and their families to participate in higher education. The era was characterized by rapid nationalization, which reduced private retail to less than 3% of total sales by 1960”) https://www.management-poland.com/pdf-189841-113727?filename=113727.pdf#:~:text=In%20summary%2C%20the%20operational%20landscape%20for%20private,faced%20the%20loss%20of%20their%20companies%20annually.
Finally looking at my mothers university and career trajectory, then mum leaving my dad and starting a business with my stepdad in the 1990s, which was a huge success, until finally pursuing her dream in art cinema and photography, most probably being inspired by my great grandmother‘s hard working attitude towards life combined with guilt of not spending enough time with my grandmother at the end of her life. Turning to myself, who, from witnessing my grandmother’s creativity fuel the whole family’s film and theatre business (costumes, set designs) as well as my own fashion ideas, being inspired by her, and pushed by by my mum and stepdad to follow through with my art practice, ending up in fashion. But while in fashion I continued creating with my grandmother (all the years I would tell her my ideas for entire collections and then she would make those ideas come to reality), until eventually I started a family and stopped creating things with her in her smoke filled apartment (grandma was a chain smoker). She gradually retreated into solitude dying 2 years after I had my son and 2 months after I got married. That made me feel really guilty and my mother I think as well as we both felt we have abandoned her in some way focusing on ourselves, while simultaneously feeling she sacrificed everything for us. I plan on working through the idea of this extreme connection between the women in my family through creativity. I want to ask: is it just a thing in Poland where the women are so intensely connected in the family with each other? We are unable to separate from one another mentally therefore, even when separation happens naturally consumed by guilt. Wondering if my grandmother‘s death was connected to not creating with me anymore and as a result it fuelled my need to work on creative things with my daughter and telling her my dreams to see her interpreting them by creating these amazing comic books. Then again my need to start doing something creative together with my mother and feeling the return of the longing for that creative connection between the women in the family. Currently thinking about doing research about creative women from various generations and how their creative practice was viewed during the time of their life – my great grandmother‘s time of life when being able to make anything by hand was just seen as a craft, as women’s work, as something that shouldn’t be appreciated. Great grandma Bronia believed that studying things such as economy at university and learning and growing your mind was much more important than creating anything with your hands so for my grandmother, who was this extremely creative artist sensitive and and potentially she had a chance to be the next Louise Bourgeois, she never appreciated the stuff she did that much, she just made it because it was something she made for us, for me, for my mom, but she never considered it art. The way I look at it now, at the way her work was viewed throughout her lifetime, just as women’s work nothing artsy, I want to give it justice it deserves now. “I want to create utilitarian craft. In the hands of women, I want my craft pieces to become a form of resistance against dehumanization of women. I include this quote from Woman Question: 1550-2025 exhibition at the MSN Warsaw because it makes me really angry:
“OUTSIDE THE ACADEMIC CANON: NEEDLE PAINTING
In 1770, the British Royal Academy of Arts officially excluded
“Needle-work… cut Paper… or any such baubles” from its exhibitions. Miniatures, pastels and watercolors were also deemed “inferior arts,” techniques unworthy of real artists, as they were “just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement,” as Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the academy at the time, put it. The need to formally remove embroidered paintings from the ambit of academic art shows that for 18th-century audiences, the difference in rank between easel painting and all other techniques was not obvious at all.
Embroidery as a pictorial art was rejected from the canon of “all artistic techniques” for several reasons. The exclusion of women from the art academy education and prohibitions around women’s status as professional artists occurred alongside the hierarchical division of the artes into art and craft. As a craft, embroidery might have been a gainful masculine occupation, but as a decorative art it was unworth of the Royal Academy.
Meanwhile, the embroidery practiced by nuns and ladies was not even the work of a male embroiderer, but a pastime engaged in by women, an exercise to teach girls diligence and precision, while embroidering patterns would aid their weak minds in learning to read and write.”
I want my grandmother’s work to be recognised as a true art form that should be noticed, that should be appreciated. Maybe it’s fuelled by the guilt of not spending enough time with her during the period of my life when I was starting my family and she stopped being the most important person in my life. I gave my daughter my grandmother‘s name as a second name hoping that her spirit in a way will continue living through my daughter. I’m getting emotional talking about this. I think I would like my daughter to be sort of an extension of my grandmother‘s incredible creative spirit and I like the idea of the generational continuation of creativity between women of my family. I want to show those threads that connected all of us to each other, through an exhibition that will combine the work of my grandmother, my mother and me, and potentially, even my daughter’s work is something so surreal and beautiful. The idea was born a while ago but it came back to me during the conversation with Jonathan right after interim show so I think there’s something there that I want to explore further. I need to dig deeper into this idea of Autoetnography (I left this hillarious typo from my Iphone Notes: ORTO pornography) and analyse deeper the generational experience of creativity between women in my family.
I want to look at Tamara Lempicka and her family history and who her daughter was and who her granddaughter is and how the creativity continues in that family. I want to look at women from my grandmother‘s generation and similarities in how they treated their quilts their embroideries and other handmade pieces of art, seen by the art world as “women’s work”. I want to find more women who were able to pass the passion for creativity throughout generations, figure out how it was what connected them to each other and that was the such a strong thread between them that it continued throughout four or five generations.
Also add the analysis of the whole conversation my mother had with my great grandmother who mentioned when she found out my mother was pregnant. I was completely devastated and really just thought my this was the end of my mum‘s life as it is she wanted my mom to just go to university study and just grow into this incredibly successful business person or or someone else but nothing related to having children and being your mother so the only reason I am actually around is because my grandmother really wanted my mom to have me and she promised to support my mom in this and my dad really wanted me to be around as well so just thinking where did that lead to and what happened with that and how involved my grandmother was in my childhood and teenagers and a very big part of my life pretty much raising me so that my mom could study could go to university and could grow her business
Exhibiting my grandma s quilt and clothes she made for me alongside my mums films about her, alongside my lamps alongside my daughters interpretation of my dreams
A giant lamp Matrioszka made of layers of lace and paper
Multi-generational exhibition including hair, clothes, lace, knitting, crocheting – babci Broni szyte, glowy na kapelusze, Hair in organza pockets and/or combined with knitted elements, shoes, lace, quilt, film,
The difference between mine and my mums view of my grandma, where mum spend most of her childhood and adulthood seeing grandma as a sad and depressed woman who was verbally abused by a gambler husband who was cheating on her. I saw grandma as an incredibly creative and talented beautiful soul, who was always there to make all my insane fashion/costume and haute couture designs come to life. I also saw her as annoying with her long stories and her neediness but her creative side was more important to me and the fact how much of her creativity was actually transferred to me. I feel she lives in me and I feel like an extension of her, who was able to continue her creative practice by being surrounded with supportive family and people throughout my art education. My grandmother was either criticized or ignored but hardly ever praised by anyone other than my mum and me. She was a middle child forced by life to care for her older and younger sisters who were both very sick when the three sisters were young. She then cared for my mum and me and her whole life was devoted to care. But she wanted to be a geologist(she loved rocks) and she should have been recognized as an artist, which is why I feel the need to talk about her
Also, story if women, who constantly had to juggle care and creativity
UNFORGOTTEN
Defying Stereotypical Expectations
@mie_olise_studio
PEOPLE TO CONTACT:
Tereza Stehlikova – srtist and researcher exploring senses, 9min44sec film Being Between Beings in which we see shared generational and relational intimacy. I will attend her 18.04 workshop at Danielle Arnauld Gallery SE11 6SF
David Cross – ask about contact with artists and students who are currently exploring the themes of Autoetnography and try to get a hold of materials I could read that could help me with my research
Ciocia Ania – my grandmothers youngest still living sister who might be a good person to talk to about our family’s history, both creative and non creative
Mountain women – lacemakers from the polish town of Koniaków – scraps of unused lace, of “mistakes”, pieces that did not work out that I could recycle into my own pieces