Artistic approach
I am an artist and art conservator working in London. I believe that involvement with art, whether as an observer, connoisseur or creator, can be a form of therapy. As an artist I focus on the subjects of childhood, motherhood and womanhood because I understand them as very universal matters. I very often portray children with their toy-attribute, held as a symbol of their individual story. I paint mothers and children hugging; breast feeding women in the shape of Madonna Lactans (nursing Madonna) – a symbol of eternal, unconditional love. I am interested in memories and their influence on us as individuals. The history of displacement, and indeed the contemporary displacement of big groups of refugees that we witness today, is very often background or starting point for many of my creative ventures. As an art conservator I think that preserving our heritage is especially important because knowing our past enables us to understand our present.
I like to work in series and use multiplications but the final creation is always unique because I believe in intuitive hands-on creation where the materials and their properties influence the way I interpret my artistic visions. Getting hands dirty, feeling the texture of the paper, working with layers and discovering how much they can take is an essential part of my work. For me visual artistic process is as much physical as it is intellectual. In other words the entire process in my studio is usually quite messy!
I would describe myself as ‘a peeper of everyday reality’, a thought that occurred to me whilst watching Kieslowski’s movie, The Red. Like the judge Joseph Kern,
I have my doubts as to whether as an artist, and in general as a human, I can change our destiny much (that doubt can be seen in some of my works), but I do believe in a creation desire that pushes us into trying. This is very human, almost tragic, and this fatalism is what I am attempting to explore in a contemporary context.
Z.Wyszomirska-Noga
Exhibitions and projects:
Art and Memory, virtual exhibition curated by Olga Topol: https://artandmemory.uk/art-and-memory
Print making and mixed media workshop for WIILMA, November 2019.
Forgotten Force. Polish Women in the Second World War. Artist residency, April-May 2019, The Jozef Pilsudski Institute of London:Project was aiming to give first-hand evidence of the past by audio and video recording stories of Polish women survivors of the Second World War who have been residing in the UK for the past seventy years. this collaboration resulted in a publication, catalogue Forgotten Force. A Journey of Memory. 2020.
Death and Rebirth, presented by Peter Knox and Emma Hamilton, Group exhibition, October 2017, Queen’s Gate Gardens.Call of the Wild, group exhibition, Dec - Jan 2017, Studio Ex Purgamento, London.
Skip, individual exhibition, May 2016, The Montage, London.
Love It, Group exhibition of visual artists, Feb 2016, The Montage, London.
Cover photographed by Olga Topol.
