EMBODIED MEMORY. THE EXHIBITION
OF ARTWORKS MADE BY PRISCILLA ROMERO
– THE LAUREATE OF THE INTERNATIONAL
PRINT TRIENNIAL IN CRACOW 2018
Adam Romaniuk, Okna I, 1978, serigrafia barwna
Plaster coins covered with gold for Living treasure, photo Wojciech Woźniak
Making alginate face mold, photo Priscilla Romero
Priscilla Romero, the laureate of the Leon Wyczółkowski Special Prize awarded by the Bydgoszcz Museum in the last year’s International Print Triennial in Cracow, is a Costa Rican artist, assistant professor in the Faculty of Graphic Art and Drawing at the School of Arts and Visual Communication at the National University of Costa Rica. These days, she works on her arts dissertation entitled Production and Research at the Technical University of Valencia. The artist moves freely in the field of site-specific, creating unique objects and graphic installations – spatial arrangements, united with the place, in which they are presented, every time creating a rich, metaphorical network of contexts. Priscilla Romero started her artistic searches from traditional printmaking techniques. Finishing her education and start-
ing her independent work as a teacher, the artist focused on studying various materials, not necessarily associated with graphic art, allowing her to obtain an image as close as possible to the model without the traditional, handmade preparation. Nowadays, she uses her own technique of latexgraphy, making casts from liquid latex that serve as both ‘graphic objects’ and matrices. The Bydgoszcz exhibition is created by eleven expanded objects and graphic installations, most of which consist of several hundred or thousand independent parts – small prints on paper or tissue, gilded plaster casts, latex matrix molds. The majority of presented artworks were made especially for the current exhibition. The artist’s concept of the exhibition focuses on referring to the past of the city and its residents. The inspiration for the developed concept were the artist’s two stays in Bydgoszcz – in 2018, immediately after receiving the prize and in spring 2019,
View on exhibition Embodied memory in District Museum, photo Wojciech Woźniak
when she participated in workshops combined with collection of material “traces” – casts/imprints of bodies and wooden structural parts of buildings, which have been earlier incorporated to the prepared works. We will find them in such artworks as Digital archive, The living treasure, Wood skins and Splinters of time. In the exhibition, the artist consolidated the Bydgoszcz themes into a coherent whole with other projects, e.g. Look closer, Resilience,
Second skin and Am I? Among the artworks featured in the exhibition, there is also The trace of Midas, awarded at the International Print Triennial in Cracow – here in a new arrangement. The topical problems in which the artist is interested, captured in an innovative visual form, contain a universal, timeless message, regarding both individual and collective identity. Barbara Chojnacka, Kajetan Giziński