A Few Reflections on My Work…

I built the foundations of my artistic practice during my studies at two art academies, in Poland and in France. Drawing and printmaking already held an important place in my practice. I gradually moved away from technical foundations, privileging experimentation and the invention of unexpected processes.

Moments of grace arise when I am in the process of making my drawings.
As I trace my lines, I enter a form of meditation. At once, I withdraw from the world and, through my artistic work, I tell it stories.

I also appreciate surprising moments, equally filled with a certain sense of fullness. They occur when my research leads me to a destination other than the one initially planned.
Often, I envisage the direct and reassuring path toward a more or less clear vision of what I want to obtain. Yet deep down, I wait impatiently to be surprised and to take off-road paths in my creations.

The lines in my drawings are drawn from top to bottom.
Where does this come from? I believe the vertical line is more “reassuring” to me than the horizontal line. First, I master it better: it is enough to control my hand gliding while holding a tool, as I did at school when drawing margins in my notebooks… I also find it more graceful; by repeating it, I feel that each descent carries the promise of a rebound toward height.

Moreover, it indicates where my place is: right in front of it. By nodding my head, I can follow it without getting lost in the immensity of space opened by the horizontal line.

I also find this verticality in my subjects: ladders, stilt houses, lifting bridges, rooted trees stretching their branches toward the sky…

I have always been spontaneously drawn to black and white, with the nuances of grey that separate and unite them at the same time.
When observing the world, I am more sensitive to the graphic quality of forms than to encounters with color.
Yet the temptation to enter a rainbow world appears from time to time…
I imagine colors treated graphically, as an alternative to black and white, which sometimes imposes on me a radicality that is difficult to negotiate.
To be developed one day…

Emptiness is necessary to emphasize presence.
For me, it represents a pause, a silence, a rest… perhaps even a form of withdrawal, a hiding place where I can catch my breath before setting out again to study and describe the world…

When I speak of narrative, I think of the content of the works, of what they present, evoke, address…
The answer to “what am I doing?” and “why?”

Form is the container.
The way of making, executing, searching, elaborating, capturing…

The boundaries between the two are sometimes blurred. Narrative and form intertwine, intersect; often one takes the lead, or, on the contrary, remains in the shadows and becomes a pretext to bring the other into the light.

At times, I have the impression that narrative serves only as a pretext to study form…
Or, conversely, that formal research relies on the subjects of my work…

I practice painting, installation, printmaking, drawing, and writing… All these techniques intersect in a kind of laboratory that is my studio.
Yet I feel that the “backbone” of my work is drawing…

I love to draw.
On different types of surfaces: paper, wood, metal, walls, glass, adhesive tape…
With a BIC pen, ink, a brush, a technical pen, a printmaking press, with marks and cuttings from a jigsaw, with wool, with charcoal trapped on tape…

My drawings are graphic, pared down, or, on the contrary, full of material research. By superimposing several layers, transparent and opaque, of acrylic and ink, creating a mille-feuille-like material effect, I seek to treat drawing as painting.

Small formats have an intimate, fragile, precious character. They require the protection of glass.
Large formats, most often in wood — a manageable material that I can cut, sand, paint — are imposing and heavy objects, sometimes taking the form of installations. To create them, my whole body is engaged, not only the wrist holding a tool. This physical effort is part of the complex and rich relationship between me and my material, which offers me both the softness of a polished surface and the porosity of raw areas.

I cultivate realism in my drawings. Poetic, symbolic, dreamlike realism…
I launch stories — or rather beginnings of stories — which may be developed or left as they are.

Narrative is born in my thoughts, nourished by my experiences, by the scenario of my own life.
Yet, in recounting my states of mind, I wrap them modestly in universal metaphors that concern us all. I do not keep diaries, but I turn toward the viewer to explore together the world of our intimacies.

As a child, I drew my dolls on paper that I cut out to play with.
In my childhood, I constantly invented imaginary realities. I traveled through strange kingdoms, wove friendships with surprising and mysterious characters, or with faithful animal creatures.

Drawing allowed me to have everything I desired. It was enough to draw it, cut it out, and play with it. I had a box filled with the heroes of my stories, made by hand.
Perhaps this is where my desire to tell stories comes from — or at least to invite others to do so through my creations.

In trying to take a broader view of the themes of my work, to analyze it with distance, I can discern chapters in my research:

When leaving Poland, I carried in my suitcases the memories of my family, my Polish identity, and the historical heritage of my native country.
Naturally, as I settled into my studio, I turned toward themes of memory and exile. To find the form of my narratives, I began experimenting with various materials.

One of them was adhesive tape, which in its primary function serves to fix, attach, stick… sometimes to repair, to assemble. In my work, it served to speak about traces of the past.

I applied transparent tape over my charcoal drawings. Once removed, the tapes carrying the traces of these drawings were reassembled on new supports such as windows, mirrors, or exhibition walls in site-specific installations.
The drawings were considered as matrices; the recomposition of displaced imprints through tape played the role of a “print.”

To go even further, I illuminated my strips of tape. The projected shadow became another apparition of the image — more blurred, at the edge of disappearance — testifying to the fragility of memory.

I also find inspiring material in rolls of wallpaper.
This commercial decorative product, accessible to all, becomes personal and intimate in our precious memories of the past. Memory retains details, fragments, crumbs of history. We remember smells, sounds, pieces of images… like that fragment of wallpaper in the bedroom of our childhood…

I also work with acrylic, watercolor, and oil painting. My canvases from the period when I was immersed in themes of memory and exile presented empty spaces, yet full of signs of life, and sleeping figures — present and absent at once.

When I moved to France, I had to mourn the part of myself left in my native country. To build a new space, I had to confront emptiness — so unsettling, yet deeply inspiring.

My creations often take the form of objects. “Tunnel of Memory” resembles a block of Post-it notes, but with a small square cut out in the center of each sheet. The accumulation of these small windows forms a long, dark passage, at the end of which lies a photograph of my mother in her youth. The image remains barely visible, but leafing through “memory,” diving into the reading of the past, gradually reveals the portrait.

In the same vein, I created the series “Memory Boxes,” evoking the fragility of our recollections. At the bottom of wooden trays lie old photographs of my family. Suspended between two edges, a transparent tracing paper brushes the surface of the images, making them barely visible. A wooden squeegee placed in the box and manipulated by the viewer only momentarily improves the readability of details.

Our images of the past are never whole: we see fragments covered by the veil of time passing or… by our desire to erase certain memories. We place memories on pedestals, or throw them into the depths of a dark tunnel…
The work entitled “Pedestals of Memory” speaks precisely of this ambiguity toward our past. We wish to preserve happy, touching, precious images, yet at the same time to forget tragic, uncomfortable moments… The installation consisted of several black pedestals, seemingly empty at first glance… A closer look revealed, hidden at the bottom of each column, a photograph of deceased persons. An internal lighting system made each image at once readable, present, distant, and inaccessible…

The starting point of this work is the relationship between a physical place and a metaphorical place — creating an imaginary world at the border of reality, between here and elsewhere.

The word “between” guides me: it evokes the lightness of suspension, hesitation before choice, the freedom to move through multiple destinations without settling, a land of asylum, a no man’s land… a life between two countries…

Time has become an object of desire, precious, like a luxury product. We want to have it, keep it, control it, make use of it, with the irrational fear that one day we might lose it.

Facing the world, time dares not show its taste for slowness, at the risk of being treated as poor and pitiful time. Dead time.
Despite itself, it must constantly fuel the deafening acceleration of the engine of existence, creating a blinding mirage of a life without emptiness and without end, while at the same time preparing and consoling the world confronted with the inevitable destiny of its finitude.

The duties of its role, heavily endured, as a conductor structuring and sustaining the unfolding of reality, force it to impose a merciless tempo. By breaking speed records that take the breath away, it prevents the world from breathing and suffocates itself. The faster it goes, the longer it lasts and makes things last… Thus it rushes past life at full speed, astonished by its own rapidity…

It spins the past on a carousel, reviving cycles and seasons like the replay of old films. It sows grains of the future, allowing belief in the eternal power of renewal.

Despite its heavy workload, it tries to soothe the neurotic anxieties of the world. But it is not a healer who erases all traces of misfortune from memory. This responsibility leaves it perplexed; it intimidates it…
It leaves the world the freedom to interpret each moment.

During the pandemic, time was content simply to be and abandoned its projections of becoming. At last, it could stop and marvel at the simple thought of having been invented on the day the world was born.

This subject guides my writing.

We try to define “our” place — the one that protects us and helps us give meaning to our existence. Drawing a form, tracing boundaries, opening doors, creating passageways, ventilating, closing, taking refuge, inviting the other to enter… the dance of the inhabitant.

Our spaces are our refuges… Yet sometimes our shelters, which we believe we know so well, instead of securing us, reserve anguishing descents into nothingness… They suffocate us, leaving us to walk in circles in the courtyard of our prison.

How can we find the right definition of our own freedom? One that is fair, comfortable, reassuring, lasting, and possible? How can we turn away from the strange beauty of our chains, which protect us from storm winds but prevent us from flying when the sky is clear?

The notion of space is linked to that of time — so changing, so elusive — which calls all our certainties into question.
The writer Georges Perec said that space melts like sand slipping through our fingers, carried away by time… What, then, remains?

How can we capture the fleeting form of our own place… in outer and inner space, and in the time that sweeps away our fixed ideas?
To peacefully accept the drifting nature of the reality around us, the blur of our self-definitions, to tame doubt, the utopia of eternal stability and security, to love the elusive edges of our existences and paths off the beaten track, to breathe suspended in a state of in-between, to befriend the no man’s land… and to dream — above all to dream — of “happy spaces, the only ones where we can find rest and escape all geometry” / Gaston Bachelard /.

We search for answers while sitting for long stretches at the edges of our cabins…

The graphic quality of branches and foliage has always formed part of the scenery of my daily life…
In my childhood, in front of the window of the family apartment, the rods of a chain outlined the shape of a dog — my dear companion who moved with the wind and changed its coat with the seasons.

Behind our building lay an imaginary country, Burgundia, inhabited by a mysterious people. Their leader welcomed me aboard his boat, woven from several twisted arms of a tree, to tell me the story of his people.

A simple stick in my hand had the power to transform into a horse. On its back, I escaped on long solitary journeys, beyond space and time.

For me, cabins are an integral part of trees, like leaves, flowers, or fruit. To inhabit them, it is enough to shelter our gaze within the embrace of branches…

The realism of my “illustrations” — as I call this current series “Made by myself” — coexists with a touch of poetry.

I recount the complex process that is the construction of the self, which never ends, because we are always becoming. Our certainties shift, our reference points are ephemeral.
It is both destabilizing and liberating.

Is it possible to truly know oneself, to invite oneself home for a sincere and authentic encounter?

Philosophy inspires my work, and I delve into the multitude of questions surrounding our existences.
I only manage to sketch the theme… which resonates with the chosen form of expression: drawing.

Made with a BIC pen, my images sometimes dialogue with photographic fragments. It is a form of encounter between the source and its interpretation…
I will never succeed in perfectly imitating reality. I cannot therefore replace it with my drawn truths, created by myself. Without regret, I prefer to keep reality elusive…

Anna Novika Sobierajski