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Joanna Wierzbicka

Discipline:

Multidisciplinary Artist

Location:

London

ABOUT:

My practice focuses on the body within the feminist posthumanities mode of thought, especially new materialism discourse. It is often process-driven, built upon back-and-forth conversations between different mediums. Through the iterative process of photographing (often with the use of different apparatuses including microscopes and medical scans), printing and sculpting, I bring attention to matter as an active agent and search for the physicality of forms that together can create an interactive environment - awakening bodily experiences, evoking tactility, haptics and engaging the sense of touch.

My research is centered around the experience of embodiment, the materiality of our bodies, and the consciousness of having and being them. I am interested in their fluidity, porousness, and trans-corporeality, asking where the bodily boundaries are and why should they be determined by the skin. I seek descriptions of how we live in our bodies, what is running through and across them, and what other actants have affected us. I am especially interested in the potential of our bodies as navigators in the chaos we are surrounded by. They become tools for understanding and dealing with current ecological questions helping to attune ourselves to the complex world we are enmeshed in. Personal, community, social, ecological, and political transformations are interdependent - our embodiment is affected and can affect.

By looking at metaphors of how our existence and embodiment are influenced by other bodies among us, I examine how we are always becoming with others. Through the exploration of our ongoing intra-activity between human and non-human, I question the anthropological understanding of our bodies as distinctively human and observe how we co-emerge with other forms of matter performing a dance between different agencies. By balancing on the line of oppositions such as life/death, human/nonhuman, internal/external, self/the other, object/subject, I recall the definition of an abject and try to translate the derived sensations in my work—how a breakdown in meaning, something expelled from “I” eventually defines “I”.

WORKS:

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'Working Class Creatives' responds to a need which is too often overlooked in the arts; that of the barriers facing working-class artists from getting on in our sector. They are instrumental in initiating much-needed change that will see the art world become more inclusive and reflect the society it purports to serve. I often search their database in my research, it is a vital resource for any arts professional working in culture today. That they have got this far on so little financial resource is remarkable and I am excited to see what they will achieve with further support.” Beth Hughes, Curator, Arts Council Collection.

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