Degree Show Installation
At The Graveside
Friends, The Caspian Sea
Three Figures
Mikolaj
Baptism
At The Graveside
Artist Statement
My practice seeks to reinvigorate generational Polish immigration narratives with reverence and empathy. I recognise that memory is fluid, and as time moves onward, narratives about the past change; some things loom larger, some less, some forms alter. I paint scenes from archival photographs, an act of mediation between the cold historical depiction and the present, subjective interpretations of the exile stories of the hundreds of thousands of Poles deported into Siberian gulags during WWII. The fluid materiality of the paint invites surges of specificity and forgetting. In this way, the painting becomes a landscape of memory, retelling and reimagining; compositions with varied articulations of form and unrecognisability. In this way, my paintings live in the tension between what was experienced, what was told and what it understood.My grandfather and family were among those deported to gulags. Upon release, he and his family migrated to the Middle East to safety, arriving in Tehran where my great-grandfather died. My work seeks to resonate with those fragmentary identities, relationships and stories formed by those who experienced or inherited this history. I work with matters of post memory: the inherited trauma carried after significant events. Using both my own family history, and the broader history of Polish exile to gulags, I seek to wrestle with the awkward elusivity of cultures of remembrance. My paintings are an act of building empathetic relationships with people who were denied this, as well as creating contemporary relationships to the past.
This work is important as it relates to the contemporary issue of representation of these narratives: “The dead are remembered, but the dead do not remember” (Snyder, 2010). These are stories we inherit, reflect and reinterpret in narratives of self and societal definition. It matters how we relate and retell all the traumas we inherit so that we might create better futures.