SCARS

1 – 18 June

Joanna Ciechanowska

Caroline Gregory

Gosia Łapsa-Malawska

Ania Sabet

Danuta Sołowiej

Rory Watson

Natalia Zagórska - Thomas

Joanna Ciechanowska

‘Broken Toys, Small Life Gone’.

Warsaw, a long time ago. Imagine, a little girl playing with her cousins. A man walks into the room to help them with their game and rolls up his sleeves. She sees a strange number on his arm… ‘What’s that?’ she asks. ‘Nothing..’ the sleeve comes down. Her cousin whispers; ‘He got it in the camp…’ Oh, the camp...She dreams of a fire, baking potatoes, the forrest, the fun, the scouts, games, the summer camp… So, she tattoos all her dolls. Her mother throws them out. She is left with one doll she couldn’t tattoo, the black one. Years later, at the funeral of a man with a tattoo who was family member, she learns that he was one of the children dr.Mengele experimented on, in Auschwitz. His twin brother died in the camp. He survived with one lung. ‘This pastel was created when my daughter was diagnosed with a genetic illness SMA1 and died at the age of 2,5.

‘Offering’.

The trauma never leaves you, one lives in a shadow. Sometimes I wonder what I could offer to God, if I had a choice, to save a child’s life.

Remembering the film ‘Sophie’s Choice’ and CS Lewis ‘A grief observed’.

Caroline Gregory

‘Flesh Blood Felt and lycra’

Sensing through skin, history swathes, whispers, feels, a longing from inside, clothed in trauma, reaching, stretching, hanging and trailing and dragging through generations.

Natalia Zagorska - Thomas

A scene from the movie Shirley Valentine: a handsome Greek fisherman is undressing Shirley as the waves rock his boat gently to and fro. Removing her dress he says something like ”a woman should never be ashamed of her scars and stretch marks, they are beautiful, they say that she has really lived, that she has survived…” Shirley looks directly at the camera: “Don’t men talk a lot of crap?!”

Well, that’s as it may be but scars are beautiful. They are a form of cartography, a detailed, living map of a uniquely personal journey drawn directly onto the skin.

Rory Watson

Rory Watson’s paintings operate in the space between abstraction and figuration. Behind a curtain of colour-blindness, faces are deconstructed, unmasking the figure underneath. As Order meets chaos, paint battles and blends over the canvas, attempting to portray the emotional expression under the skin.

Danuta Sołowiej

Scars bear the traces of interventions, for better or worse. Some are inflicted, others self-imposed. We can choose to show them off or to camouflage. They can be seen as a marker of time but they are not constant. Attempts at capturing these transformative moments lie behind my work in this exhibition.

Ania Sabet

Memory is flickering.

It was a dream with glistening beaches, multicolour seas and weird creatures. until we were woken up by the sound of a single gun shot. Black volume, war, chaos, tear gas, and death filled the air that then froze and stayed. The air we breathed replaced sense with non-sense….and the more I tried to untangle myself the more lost I was.

I run in all directions, so many directions…but the only space I could find to hide were the clouds of my mind….no one could imprison me there…so I stayed.

They said Art is not in this new nonsensicalness. At least the art that bites the absurd shape of their reality.

Perhaps beyond the black veils there is another universe. I searched, climbed, tumbled and nearly drowned to get there.

Remember! Art is not…is not….not…..no

But medicine might be if only as a way to heal myself. Many years went by until I picked up a brush and realised Art is.

In all its contours, configurations and angels….In all its is and is nots Art is.

Everything finally made sense.

I was free again.