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.

 

Phot. Alicja Bielawska

The work At this time of the day even shadows have colours was part of the exhibition Art Ingredients which was dedicated to children. While creating the work, I wanted to get inside colours. I created vibrant spaces that invite viewers to spend some time inside being surrounded with colours. I used light fabrics that let a little light in. Being inside these small interiors with waving walls viewers may not only see the colour but also feel it.
The colours seem to be fugacious as if the light, but on the other hand, they can be touched as the fabric. The colours of floating “rooms” are arranged with colours of mattresses. The viewers may sit on them, lie down and even change this composition and watch how colours react on each other – how they match and clash.

 

Dreamed at Night by the Light of Day was created especially for the interior of the Powidoki café at the Museum on the Vistula.
The artist exploited the height of the interior to introduce a new space floating over the heads of the visitors. The work is built from fabric running along irregular arcs. Chiffon is printed with interpenetrating colours stressing the transience of divisions. The drawing of waving lines is answered by the rhythm set by ceramic balls. The artist introduces colours that are equally substantial and transient, establishing rhythms and changing under the influence of light. This variation depending on the time of day draws attention to the role of perception in how the work is received.
Dreamed at Night by the Light of Day fits within the interior but also opens up the architecture to a different experience. The work began with drawings, but when translated into space it suggests motion and outlines fragments of its trajectory. The artist’s earlier works, as well as treatises on colours and graphic scores, shine through this work. The title stresses the roles played by imagination, intuition and memory in the process of both creation and reception of the work.

 

(Phot. Marek Gardulski)

Kasia Michalski Gallery, Warsaw, 2017

The air takes on shades

In Acting with Shapes, Alicja Bielawska uses parts of her sculptures, which are put in motion by dancers. Bodies and objects are granted equal rights. The movements are inspired, but most of all determined by the objects she created and selected for the performers. Acting with Shapes are based on simple moves, familiar and everyday, which in connection with parts of the sculptures, create new compositions and associations.

 

It seems that Alicja Bielawska’s thinking is determined by a line. Both by the visible one as well as the one, which cannot be seen, which is nevertheless a mark, a trace leading from the drawing to the sculpture and the other way around. When asked what is most important for her – drawing or sculptures – the artist says that one cannot make such a distinction. Both forms of expression exist simultaneously, mutually interweaving with and complementing each other. The difference is encompassed in the scale of its activity. Drawing for Bielawska is a very intimate action, which requires concentration as well as a specifc type of work with one’s body. The gesture of using the colored pencil comes from within and the hand constitutes a direct extension of the thought, the literal transposition of the ideas to a sheet of paper. The sculpture, however, exerts an influence with its material and size. The artist reaches beyond the sheet of paper and traces lines in space – literally and metaphorically. Her works are based on divisions rather than building structures, seizing space, partitioning and connecting it back together.
(…)
The lines do not appear exclusively on paper and in space, but they also appear on pieces of fabric that the artist uses. She uses textiles: plain, made out of cotton and wool, as well as blankets covered with a custom designed chequered pattern. This most popular motif in mass-production, which all of us have encountered, becomes a cartographic network of connections. The fabric created according to the artist’s design is one of a kind – with a potential to become a serial product. It appears as an element of sculptures, which balance between an artistic object and an item of everyday use.

 

Alicja Bielawska in conversation with Kristina Aglaja Skaldina:

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.