Artist Statement

Art is often considered to be our first language, a means through which we express our ideas and thoughts as children, before the linguistic faculties emerge.

 

While language is already portrayed through different modalities: visual, auditory, and non-verbal communication, I am interested in seeing language in a physical dimension, as a sculpture, having a physical form. It is no longer art expressing language, but language expressed as art. Results of this inquiry have led me to the development of a codified and systematic way of mapping letters of the alphabet to physical shapes, where phrases become sculptures. A composition of letters forming an expression thus becomes a physical object.

 

My constructed alphabet system contains 26 letters based on the English alphabet, where each letter corresponds to a three-dimensional porcelain object. For example, the letter “T” is represented by a cube, the letter “O” by a sphere, the letter “S” by a square, and so on. Introductions of additional languages are in progress, starting with my native language Polish, as well as languages native to the state of Washington, committing to my love for language preservation and raising awareness of linguistic diversities.

 

Language is a sacred component of culture, one of its most valuable representations, a signal, a pulse. Language extinction is synonymous with cultural extinction. In a way, creating my own language of objects feels like preserving myself, solidifying my language of expression, connecting the two worlds: language and art, and (re)learning a native language.

 

Nothing exists in a vacuum, everything is interconnected.

 

Through transformation of language into concrete objects, I evoke my own transformative processes. Each corresponding phrase/title has a significant meaning in my life and in my own practice of raising awareness and connecting to a deeper self. Each phrase results in a sculptural representation according to the letters it is composed of. These mappings are predefined and consistent across all sculptures. The many layers of representation – language, its meaning, taking the language apart into its basic letter components, putting them back together to form a sculpture, placing that sculpture into its mini verse, a vignette of sorts – form their own field of meaning and visual representation. Art and language are cohesive, interdependent, and merged.

 

Form follows language.