- Mar 31, 2021

"My artistic practice is like the work of a detective. I keep a close eye on everything around me"

Aleksandra Przybysz

Artist

Kraków/Poland

What inspires you?

I am inspired by the puzzles recorded in landscapes, found things, rituals and folk beliefs of my ancestors. Heard stories, legends, dreams. All that mysterious and untold.

How do you work on your projects?

My artistic practice is very much like the work of a detective. I keep a close eye on everything around me, stopping for longer over something bizarre and not quite matching the rest. Nothing will escape my attention. I try to record everything what interests me with words in my notebook or document it with photographs. Research is also very important in my practice. Often, thanks to this I fall into the next traps of my projects. As befits a detective, I love to search the attices, cellars, old closets, books, landscapes and abandoned places in search of answers to my questions.

Depending on the topic I want to talk about, I use a whole spectrum of different media. These include word, sculpture, drawing, installation, graphics, video and photography.

Recently, most often it is a form of installation. I work with space and study its applications, impose my own rules and symbolism.

I also work with my boyfriend, who is a photographer. We help each other with our art investigations.

During the first lockdown, we decided to flee to the countryside. We lived in an old house on a hill surrounded by forest and mountains in the south of Poland. The house belongs to Tomasz's grandmother, who throughout her life collected amazing amounts of different things. First of all, the roots that seem to be the rightful inhabitants of her holiday house. We lived there for almost half a year and during this time we have started doing various projects together. We visited nearby villages, forests and found more and more interesting things in them.

Then we moved to the east, where I, in turn, have a small cottage in the countryside. Throughout the summer we led a nomadic lifestyle. We created together a wonderful project about abandoned houses. We felt like the characters of my beloved childhood cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where are you? visiting the ruins and listening to their stories for almost a year. There was always someone willing to tell us spooky stories about a specific place.

What's something you recently realized about yourself/life/art?

I think it was a rediscovery of the sculpture and various similar actions in my own practice. I am a graduate of the faculty of sculpture.

And I'm a sculptor by training, but until recently I somehow rejected it from myself. I ran away from this concept without being able to identify with it. At the end of my studies, I moved away from the concept of strictly sculpture and took more care of photography, video and developing the conceptual side of my projects. As a sculptor, I felt insecure and inadequate because I didn't work with pure matter, and that's a real sculpture for me. It's taking it into your own hands and forming it in space. It's something real that you can touch, that you have to get around. It's a fight with some material, hard physical work. I was not feeling fully sufficiently on this issue for the last couple of years.

Recently, however, something has changed in me in this topic and I subconsciously began to re-implement the sculptural form into my practice. In site-specific installations, or even translating my drawings into 3D thanks to found cables, wires, strings. I am increasingly getting ideas for sculptural projects, which I am very happy about. I guess I'm slowly growing up to call myself a sculptor.