Adela Kaluzinska (she/her)

The processes of drawing, painting and recently carving, are fundamental to my art practice through which I process my understanding of memory and place, specifically in relationship to disrupted experiences of geographic and emotional interpretations of landscape. Stemming from my own diasporic experience, the act of physical correspondence with family and maintaining an archive of photographs, letters and documents has become an intrinsic part of the way I construct images. I focus on objects and snippets from landscapes which I feel hold both universal and culturally specific material and aesthetic properties- such as pylons, pavements or public seating; the slight variations depending on geography in the colour, surface and shape are elements my work is built upon.
Through different expressions of drawing, I’ve tried to find balance between formalism and narrative; juxtaposing abstract patterns extracted from familiar urban environments with symbols of religion is an ongoing theme in my practice, tackling the bizarre phenomena of iconography and faith intertwined with landscape. My process is also strongly based on indexicality of colour and material, specifically in relation to hauntology and evoking familiarity. I find the process of carving away elements of the surface I work on to be reflective of my approach to sources images, which I dissect until a vagueness is achieved, and memory is synthesised into a new form of visual data. My work asks how the mundane and banal can be so emotional, and at times melancholic; by utilising the diptych/ series approach to making, I impose a dialogue between surfaces and layers which brings back the disassembled motifs together into a strange nostalgic mass.

Archipelago 1 & 2
Lato 2012 I & II (Diptych)


Matka Boska Targowa

Targ

Tetttka/ Tetka


They Belonged to His Mother (Diptych)

