Look more at the fragment of this floor, then squint.
In the centre there is a small 5×5 cm square. Starting from this point, the pattern used to spread in ripples onto the whole square-shaped building that housed the wedding hall. Now, in the place where the building used to be, there is nothing but an empty square. In the museum store room the remains of the marble floor boards rest on shelves. Put together, they would cover around 3×3 m. The floor used to be in a mirror-covered hall. It seemed to float in the gap between the floor and the wall.
Desperate to apprehend its geometrical order, I drew the pattern on graph paper. Lines made with a soft pencil kept missing the tiny squares. With its constant swelling and shrinking, this pattern fell into my mind.
The starting point is a square. A closed form. Yet I would like to leave the floor area. I want to draw the whole building. I want to feel this space and be able to touch it. So I grab some wire and shape it into a 30×30 cm square, and then I bend it here and there. The square outline develops into an irregular space that fits between the curved lines. Imagine that the shape that you are now holding in your hands gradually grows until it reaches ten times its original size. You can easily get inside and have a walk around. The metal lines delineate the area. This model allows you to practice converting flat space into three dimensions. It might come in useful when instead of places we have only flat photographs of them. Just like when the optical illusion of the flooring pattern is no longer reflected in mirrors.
Squint once more. With the focus taken off the details, the rippling reality will come to the fore.

 

Fabric and ceramics belong to the sphere of everyday life and to the domain of touch. These are useful materials; I stretch them and give them different shapes.
A grid pattern is stretched over a narrow strip of a dozen meters. Initially, these were drawings. Hand-drawn patterns became the basis of the woven fabric. In the process of transferring the drawings onto the cloth some errors appeared; parts of lines faded into the grid’s gradients. The checkered pattern expanded and swelled.
There are ceramic objects arranged on the fabric. They could be bases or stands for other items, or for a head or hand. It may seem that their shiny surfaces would gently bend under the burden, just as clay takes shape when moulded by hands. And that the colors of molten glaze would ripple across the forms. But this is an illusion, the shapes and surfaces have frozen.
It is a moment of rest and waiting. It’s the afternoon, the time of the day when we move slowly, subconsciously defining our own motion relative to other points and bodies.

Alicja Bielawska

 

(Phot. Frederik Gruyaert)

Starter Gallery, Warsaw, 2016

A drawing on the wall and a light structure made of metal tubes fill the interior and give it new perspectives. Colors stretch between them. Here and there you can see small objects; some have soft surfaces, others are hard and smooth. These are things that remember gestures and touch. Also present, is us; those who retrieve impressions.

In the works of Alicja Bielawska, shapes and materials undergo a poetic transformation. The point of departure is intensified sensitivity to touch and color, but also forms which have sunk somewhere deep into our memory, and now have distorted proportions and are prone to disintegration. Her sculptures attempt to touch the physicality of objects and to capture glimpses of their materiality. Her drawings combine the organic creative process with intuited laws of physics and mathematics – the structures of shapes are inscribed into the swelling or shrinking spaces enclosed in the two dimensions of a sheet of paper.

Ceramic surfaces, metal rods wrapped in fabric, dangling planes of fabric, drawings stretched across the walls. Materials and shapes recall once touched objects. Remembered stories have disintegrated. The remaining fragments require connections to be drawn but they do not become more legible. Just as the lines connecting the points of the stars are arranged in shapes which make it difficult to recognize the names of constellations.

As you walk around the objects placed in the exhibition room, pay attention to your body. What is your step like – fast, slow, hesitant? What positions do you assume when viewing the works, do you bend, crouch, or tiptoe? What do you pay attention to, the interior or the objects? Or perhaps to other people who are in this space?

Objects enter into a relationship between themselves and the interior. While moving between them, you leave a line of steps behind you. Objects are reference points, you look for connections between them or focus on individual things. Maybe in your mind you move them somewhere else, finding a better place for them.

A hundred thousand years from now, the arrangement of the stars will be different from the one we know. Maybe someone will see constellations in them and give them new names.

Alicja Bielawska examines the choreographic capabilities of her works during her performances with the participation of dancers. The first one took place during her residence in the Nida Art Colony in Lithuania in 2016. In the clear, white space delineated on the floor, with the aid of colorful lines of the drawing, the dancer struggles with the movement determined by one of the works. The blanket folded in a cube is the eponymous soft ground under her feet. A small rectangular piece of material becomes a base on which the dancer carries out a sequence of moves taken from everyday situations. At the same time every change of the blanket’s position is followed by a change in the positioning of the body and, what follows, a change in the space surrounding it.

Anna Szary

(excerpts from the catalogue Alicja Bielawska, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, 2017)

 

The basis of my creative process is the drawing as a means of visualizing ideas. For me, it is not a sketch but rather an autonomous work made concurrently with the sculpture, often a reflection on them. Sometimes things that are impossible in physical space can be encapsulated in a drawing. In …and an indescribable outline I wanted to use blankets made on the basis of my drawings. All my works are highly intuitive, being also the result of collaborations, in this case, with a weaving mill in Białystok.
At some point, I no longer have a total control over the final effect of my project, how the project will be translated in the production process.
In fact, I’m not interested in its exact replication. Technological limitations, contact with persons specialising in a particular material or technology, offering their suggestions on the subject — all this results in a very interesting process. I accept that chance, or other people’s knowledge, can contribute to my work, sometimes in surprising or unplanned ways. What proved inspiring this time was the aspect of machine weaving, where my handmade drawing was first interpreted by a designer at the factory and then by a machine. When I started working on this project,
I was wondering how the textile could be made and I decided I was decided in machine waving rather than manual weaving. The fact that the textile (though made by a machine) won’t be put into serial production and won’t become functional (even if it has such potential) means that it is something ‘in between’. The fabric the blanket is to be made of is a semiproduct, ‘almost a blanket’.

Lines and shapes on a walk, 2014
pencil, coloured pencil on paper
40 x 40 cm

Some thoughts on the artistic practice of Alicja Bielawska

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
John Berger, “Ways of Seeing”

Each piece in Alicja Bielawska’s body of work stands on its own, yet taken together they reveal a modular significance, unfolding among and between them a set of multiple layers and vectors like puzzle pieces, a complexity immediately apparent. This idea of a whole becomes even more obvious through titling; works often bear the same title as the exhibition, with the addition of a subtitle or number. Of course, this show is an exception, named as it is after the sculpture Mufka na trapezie.

Alicja Bielawska’s drawings, installations and objects are characterized by a delicate, almost fragile restraint, that belies a blade-like clarity in her approach to form. The sculpture Exercises for Two Lines consists of two metal rods bent into geometrical elements that form an arch within the gallery. This figure is repeated, upside down. The curved sections are covered with coloured fabric. The wrapping, especially in relationship to the drawings, frees the piece from the two-dimensional graphic line, revealing a haptic quality. Suddenly you want to touch it, to know what it is made of, how it balances, what it reminds you of. In spite of all its transparency it becomes a kind of hurdle; the gaze is caught and the viewer is captured in that triangle formed by himself and the work in the space.

Drawings, sometimes presented on shelves, become objects in Alicja Bielawska´s exhibition layouts. They are both prefigurations of spacial installations and independent works. In the shown drawings, the ink skilfully creates a continuous line – without breaks or correction. Juxtaposed against the sharp precision of the line are coloured balls balanced upon the the edges of the shaped

form. In other drawings colours are used to try out potential and suggested movements in a playful way that won´t happen in the realized sculpture. Colour (in the form of fabric, crayons, or modelling clay) is an important element in the language of Alicja Bielawska and adds a softness and playfulness to the always underlying sharpness of lines or metal rods.

This sharpness is an important part in her form-finding process, described by the artist as transforming and abstracting a taken form. The procedure of carving out a geometrical figure, searching for suitable materials, techniques and colours gives the sculptures substance, creates a certain atmosphere and tension as the works trigger a line of associations, connotations and faded memories – references to places and objects in everyday life. It sets thoughts in motion. If these works were shown in Kandinsky’s famous Bauhaus seminar Introduction to the Abstract Elements of Form, they would have been well received; Alicja Bielawska is interested in a sensitization of perception through form. Form, however, is merely one element used in relation to the others. Another reference could be the Open Form Theory of Polish architect and artist Oskar Hansen. This concept includes ideas on art process, interactivity, the revision of the artist-audience hierarchy through respecting the recipient’s individuality and creating a spatial atmosphere conducive to reflection. Alicja Bielawska’s works do this, calling up associations which with childhood memories of climbing scaffolds on play grounds. This “somehow familiar feeling” is a consequence of the fact that memory and geometry are bound up with one another in our brains. So one thought, link, memory leads to the next one; Alicja Bielawska’s works trigger a chain of associations in the viewer while resisting narrative.

Alicja Bielawska’s visual language unfolds through the gallery. At the end of the viewer’s journey is the name-giving work, Mufka na trapezie, a title which exactly describes its object, a muff on a trapeze. Having experienced the artistic language of the work in the exhibition, the viewer is ready for this final exercise; the game starts again.

Claudia Gehre

 

Four colors on gray background are four curtains designed for the auditorium located in the center of the temporary seat of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.