emerging artist award 2017 Kildare County Council
BE-LONGING
Home and Identity informs my art since I left Poland in 2006. I arrived in Ireland, having just graduated from Art Academy and coming here began my adulthood.
I very quickly realised that I completely under-estimated the cultural aspect of leaving my own country, language, and heritage. I started conversations with neighbours at the estate where I lived. I recorded those interviews getting a deeper insight into people's stories.
I started looking for ways of expressing the connection.I used the literal map of the estate as a background for the ceramic houses. I started drawing on paper houses that I designed as a form of boxes. But after few attempts of getting people to decorate them I found that I need something more permanent that would make the participants feel more precious and they would see the process as requiring a certain set of skills. Ceramic and glazing seemed to be good solution.
In terms of a form I decided on the use of multiplication in both the graphic representation and the installation. I find the design of new estates amusing visually. The estate contains 144 identical houses. I designed a set of wallpapers with the front of the house as the main motif. Each of them breaks the pattern in some way fighting this visual boredom. The length of the wallpapers is exactly the same as the height of the walls inside the houses.
Creative Ireland award 2018
US/THEM
The project was a continuum of my pursuit of a theme of identity and a sense of place through collaboration with people from the local communities.
Migrations instigate economic and social transformations, in addition to engendering a new cultural diversity, which frequently calls the national identity into question. The arrival of new diasporas in Ireland has instigated, amongst other consequences, increased concern with questions of identity and belonging in twentieth-first century Ireland. In response to globalisation and increased migration is the marked tendency to define nationality in opposition to migrants.
I invited the collaborators to a dialogue that would highlight some of the individual concerns about changing the linguistic and cultural landscape of Ireland. Through the creative process, involve people of different ages and backgrounds living in Newbridge and Kildare.
creative Ireland award 2019
BI-LINGUAL
Language is the main component of cultural identity, it is a display of heritage and history and I hope that acquiring the language will bring me closer to becoming a part of the world I am in today.
The affluence of communication that comes along with sharing a language promotes connections and roots to ancestors and cultural histories. Therefore, it is important to me to make sure that my children who are born in Ireland speak Polish and are familiar with their Polish heritage. In this case, what are the cultural consequences of Irish people speaking mostly English? I feel that being aware of all that, as a Polish person, learning Irish would send a strong message about the importance of preserving the Irish language and promoting Irish culture