The space enclosed in brackets of colors creates a sculpture/site to spend time in. The stripes of color make slight waves and flow down from the lines of metal constructions. For a fleeting moment, the stripes reflect the shape of a passing person.

One can imagine that this is a pavilion standing on a red mountain with a yellow cloud waving above it. From the blue, turquoise, and green lines surrounding the pavilion, droplets of water run off and gather in a red ravine to form a small stream. Heat radiates from the yellow lines of the clouds moved by the wind. Each color has its own temperature.

This space is built by colors and shapes that are abstract in themselves, but together form a whole in the actual space and in our experience of space. Our memories and imagination create the site only for the brief moment when we visit it. It does not belong to the sphere of our physical everyday life, but is a place that can help us feel colors, space, and our own body.

Through the texture and color of materials, we can enter new sensations or feel old ones. Materials and colors allow us to experience the scale and volume of both shapes and the air, and through them also our own presence. It is a sculpture/site where the physicality of materials and colors, thoughts and emotions, impressions and memories, movement, and the sense of our own physicality meet.

Alicja Bielawska

For years, my grandmother Halina Bielawska has been making cut-outs inspired by Jewish tradition. Paper cut-outs are used in Jewish culture to decorate the home, but are also closely related to religious customs and ceremonies. My grandmother has been learning this craft under the supervision of Monika Krajewska, an artist whose work focuses on Jewish paper cutting. My grandmother cuts out small pieces of paper and slowly shapes start to emerge: symbolic floral (grapevine, tree of life) and animal (deer, tigers, fish, birds) motifs, as well as menorahs, crowns, and houses. These shapes blend seamlessly to form a unified design on the paper’s surface. Between the shapes are empty areas of dark background, which make it possible to see the images. Cut-outs are often symmetrical, with motifs repeated on the other half of the sheet of paper. Each cut-out creation may take many hours spread over several days. These cut-outs are not only images, but also a record of precise hand movements.

In my works, created in dialogue with my grandmother’s works, I reproduce these cut out, empty fragments in other materials – fabric and plywood. I select only certain details, enlarge them, separate them from the original images in order to discover new arrangements and constellations. I impose the openwork nature of cut-outs onto objects that relate to everyday life – a screen and a curtain, which suggest separation or covering something, but they are also light and movable. The holes cut in their surfaces reveal what is beyond them; they don’t create concrete images. In the screen and fabrics, empty spaces are arranged in undefined patterns and repeated in the rhythm of reflection, similarly as in the cutting out of a folded sheet of paper. They reveal things, in contrast to my grandmother’s cut-outs where the empty shapes make the images emerge.

Traditional Jewish cut-outs were used as interior decoration, but the purpose of their symbols was to protect the house. In addition, precise cutting is associated with a kind of contemplation of shapes and time; gestures of covering, revealing, and seperating have a power to tame and create space. In my works, I transform the images of my grandmother’s cut-outs into understated and repetitive patterns. I focus on details and gestures – my grandmother’s and mine – which intertwine in these moments, intertwine in the folding of fabrics, the movement of curtains, and the braiding of hair.

Alicja Bielawska

 

Spatial Markers – a series of screens meant for spatial management. They can be set up and shifted at will, creating new ways of dividing a space and separating its functions. It can serve as a shelter a fence or simply a backdrop.