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.

 

(Phot. Bartosz Górka)

 

BWA Zielona Góra, 2013

 

An embroidered curtain hanged on a metal structure marks a half-open space, like a thick rope wrapped tightly with textile straps that crosses a space. Shiny strings of curtains undulate slightly in a spell and blankets with irregular pattern softly float above the floor. Woven and plaited patterns lose their order and the coloured lines embroidered on the fabric are actually an enlarged form that kids usually sketch before they learn to write. Metal rods wrapped with coloured pieces of material form a three-dimensional drawing. Things taken out of context lose their functionality but their simplistic, modified or scaled forms seem strangely familiar. The sculptures create new places, which may serve as a potential refuge and a private space of transformed memories.

Works of Alicja Bielawska are situated on the border between the experience of everyday life, associations and memorized details. Aberration from what we take for given, common, everyday leads the artist to careful observation and raises questions about the relativity of perception and memory. The exhibition is a showcase for the series of sculptures and works on paper realised recently.

MEANINGS

The exhibition When things will find their place showcases new works: sculptures, silkscreen prints and collages which have been created in the past year and a half. The title of the exhibition is a statement and at the same time a question not fully defined in time and place. This title provokes questions about the order of things around us that we try to determine, about the meanings we give to things, about how they function in our memories, about the place they take in our private mythology of reality and in the order of our memories. Some works include the word ‘between’ in their title, which refers to their status as an object that does not belong to everyday life, yet refers to it. One that is located on the edge of what is memorized and partly forgotten, and then restored. Right in this zone things begin to loop, bend and break.

PATTERNS 

Contrary to what it might appear like, this exhibition is not about the fabric, but rather about the issues that are connected with it, its associations with everyday life, touch, gesture. Sculptures have a similar approach to fabric and use it in different ways, from the use of found objects, such as string curtains to woven blankets, which were realized according to my design. Yet each of these works also applies to simple gestures, such as revealing, uncovering, covering, wrapping, braiding. The works on paper are focused on two themes which are also present in the sculptures. One is a grid pattern, its interlacing lines refer to the activity of weaving. Grid and net are the starting point for me, from the imposed order to the disruption, from a predictable structure to the unlimited possibilities of mistakes that are likely within it, and which can deform it. In the collages intertwining lines of the grid overlap or penetrate the drawings of not fully defined objects and outlined space, and the expected order of the lines is disrupted. Similarly, in the work consisting of two blankets that seem normal everyday objects, a grid pattern in two areas is slightly deformed. Error occurs in what is familiar, tame and common. The second theme is inspired by the patterns drawn by children before they start learning how to write. In silkscreen prints these patterns are overlapping, blurring their readability and making new ones out of them. These patterns also appear on the embroidered curtain, which is suspended on a metal frame wrapped in colourful fabrics. Transferred to the fabric, they still form a line, a figure, but at the same time they are a part of a larger whole which defines the space around them. The construction, which can be a partition, screen, coat rack, drying rack, bar, ladder, carpet–beating rack, tent frame was wrapped in scraps of materials and interlaced with lines of scaled patterns.

FABRIC 

I’m interested in the material sphere of everyday life, in the things that surround us and the materials from which they are made. In the case of works presented at the exhibition I used mainly fabrics. Other materials, such as metal rods are the framework for soft fabrics. I used clothing and fabrics cut into narrow strips to wrap around the metal frame and ropes. Different colours, textures, patterns break their shapes and give them an extra lightness. In addition to the nature of the material and related associations, I am also interested in the production process of the fabric. Two blankets and the embroidered curtain were made according to my design in workshops of the TextileMuseum in Tilburg in the Netherlands, where I took part in their production.

THINGS  

Although most of my works relate to objects of daily use, such as a screen or a blanket, I am not interested in their practical side, to which moreover they do not aspire due to their delicacy or the change of form. Everyday objects are often a source of inspiration to me, but they do not have the meanings of the sculptures which are a poetic transformation of forms. 

PLACE

My sculptures placed in specific interiors refer to them, but they also create and define the space around them. They begin to exist when they are viewed and the viewer is confronted with their size and creates a relationship with them. Dimensions of sculptures refer to the size of a viewer, they have a human scale. Several layers of tightly wrapped fabrics create an irregular rope of patterns and colours pulled through the interior and hanging within a hand’s reach. A large construction covered with fabrics in several colours creates a different space. It is a three-dimensional drawing, in which you can enter and view it from different sides, each time changing the perspective and the arrangement of the lines.

EXERCISES

The activity of doing exercises appears in my work, both in the titles, as well as in their themes, such as pre-school children’s drawings – to repeat the same pattern, which is to prepare them for writing letters. These different patterns have a direct relationship with the shapes of letters or their fragments, but repeating them in a continuous line forms a drawing, which can be changed into something else. In my work I draw these patterns, duplicate, layer, and scale them. I am interested in repetition, which paradoxically allows for the appearance of errors, deviations that may lead outside the designated lines. Some sculptures are entitled ‘exercise’ and like three-dimensional drawings, they are trying to sketch, mark the space. They refer to an important activity – practicing of looking – particularly paying attention to and looking at the details. 

Alicja Bielawska