Various ideas explored after creating the wings for the ArtEvol 2026 exhibition after finding diary from 1994 when I was 12 years old and was diagnosed with scoliosis and had to spend a month in a special institution, where I was taught special exercises and was given treatments to make my back straight. I spend a week reading the diary and thinking about using the correction corset for the wings.
The title and description for the installation:
A Month in the Life of the Institution, 1994
A Month in the Life of the Institution, 1994 begins with a posture-correction corset and a diary I kept aged twelve while undergoing treatment for scoliosis in post-communist Poland. At an age when I had already absorbed the expectation that a girl should be pretty, perfect and physically “correct,” scoliosis made my body feel like a contradiction of that ideal. My diary records an institution with poor facilities and a culture focused on correcting children’s bodies rather than recognising the fear, shame and emotional burden treatment placed upon them. Care often felt like discipline; empathy was secondary to the task of “fixing” us.
Fragile wings made from willow and hand-crocheted Polish lace emerge from the restrictive garment, attempting flight while remaining bound to it. Original diary pages and English translations bring my twelve-year-old voice into dialogue with my adult perspective thirty-two years later. Presented in ordered acrylic frames and white display cards, they evoke an anthropological, medical or archival study, contrasting institutional classification with the intensely subjective experience recorded by a child.
Made now as an artist and mother, the work examines rules internalised since childhood—how women should look, behave, mother and sacrifice—and asks whether we can ever cut away the structures we have learned to carry.
