Małe formy (Small Forms) comprise poems selected from the collection titled Wiersze nienamalowane (Unpainted Poems, 2004) and Zielone pojęcie (Pretty Green, 2014) and the collection of handmade papers moulded according to the Japanese traditional method (2004-2014).
The Japanese method of handmade paper production requires craftsmanship. It is necessary to gain knowledge how to prepare the matter which we are going to use in the process and then practise, practise and practise. As far as I am concerned, the term ‘Japanese method’ should be combined with my own ‘mixed media’. The Japanese paper means precision of production established historically. My first papers were based on rebellion which made me use the Japanese method, heading for the world of painting. My disobedience was forgiven and even appreciated by the masters. My books made of the Japanese handmade paper realised in my own technique have twice been awarded with an honourable mention in the international competitions ‘Oshima World Handmade Picture Books Contest 2002 and 2004’ held by Oshima Museum of Picture Books in Japan. My book is also in the collection of Museum & Library of Musashino Art University in Tokyo.
I mainly work in a small studio in the country. In the process of paper production my ‘palette’ consists of small baths with colourful suspension. My ‘brush’ is a hand mould to scoop. The image is not created on the ground but both of them are created simultaneously. I try to shape the material in this way that, on the one hand, it does not resist my will, and on the other hand, it lets intuition work – the way it works in nature. The act of creation – as it is common in art – is essential here. Paper offers an opportunity to create images in a similar way to those which shape nature. It is the rhythm, movement and time. It is a chance to benefit from the relations which rule the clouds which drift across the sky, the grass combed by the wind, rocks which are slowly marked by traces of time. I am fond of my cooperation with nature and the coarse simplicity of what paper is made of.
According to my understanding of things, the key to art is a gift of observation and the awareness of what we see. I like working surrounded by nature. The landscape enhances my reflections, leaving pictures which later are liberated in a creative act.
Poems are a kind of liberation of thoughts too. In my artwork I always tend towards synthesis. Therefore, I search for lapidary painting and poetic solutions.

Ewa Latkowska-Żychska

A tapestry of existence

Ewa Latkowska-Żychska’s works are compositions endowed with great beauty, evoking numerous semantic areas.
Despite the fact that they are non-representational, they are suggestive enough to let us recognise many sources of inspiration. They reflect the whole beauty of nature. Undoubtedly, we can find there the echoes of the surrounding nature, but we also feel it is not just a visual interpretation of landscape elements and their afterimages. It is an act filled with an almost pantheist infatuation with the manifestations of life as well as with respect and a humble approach towards the glory of the act of creation. Thus, the imagery elements retained in the handmade paper connote what is close, available for the taking, poignant because of its sensitivity and fragility. However, they are also associated with a variety of solar and lunar motives – like in her poems, where there is both affection for things so petty as a moth’s death and amazement at the vastness of the universe. Layers of fragmented dyed fibres, flowing over the plane, bring to our mind the image of riverside reeds, mown areas of grass in meadows, birch groves, clods of soil turned by ploughshares.

On the other hand, we can also spot stains and explosions on the surface of the Sun, a foggy veil which surrounds the moon, strata of clouds overlapping with some objects in the sky. When we become aware of the way paper is made, in which these images are conjured, we have an impression that they are not wet fibres and pigments that create them but it is the artist who boldly derives great benefits from the gifts of nature – uses the paper mould to pick up blue directly from the sky, borrows greys from the panel of water, steals green from the grass, adds a piece of sun gleaming with oranges and the cool silver of the moon, mixes everything in appropriate proportions or she sews it up together into a unique patchwork by magic gestures. Elements of composition comprised of ephemeral components come from observations of the world, they have a concrete effect in the external world, but there is no doubt they are also a reflection of the world of the artist’s emotions. At the same time the image is also a record of her feelings and thoughts.

That manner of contemplating life in its varied manifestations is a way to achieve a state of bliss. The record made of colourful signs ingrained in the structure of paper is read as if it was a book. In Ewa Latkowska-Żychska’s poems, manifestations of nature represent a lot of aspects: darkness feels velvety, silence is defined by softness, the voice is material, and thoughts are colourful. In a work of art signs also contribute to the language built of the rustle of leaves, swoosh of grass, rumblings of a storm, echoes of remote volcanic eruptions. Someone’s fate might have been inscribed into them, perhaps it is a story about destiny. It might be a fado song retained in signs of nature.

The flat surface of the Japanese handmade paper hides depth in it. The spatial character is created by overlapping spilled layers of dyed fibres. It is intensified by differentiated textures obtained due to the introduction of a variety of natural ingredients into the matter.

The works are characterized by noble simplicity, and at the same time they are eye-catching, offering close contact, organic and biological in their character. All these features are revealed in this artwork at many levels. Their multidimensional nature has both literal and metaphorical meaning here.

It is not just about the complexion of the connoted imagery motives, but about their colour tones typically associated with colours of nature. It does not only consist in the presence of flowing forms in the works similar to biological ones, both those close to ovals as well as cuneiform ones, penetrating the plane of arrangement to disrupt the established order, or, contrary to this, to determine the rhythm of the composition. They are the factor that evokes the artistic act of symbolic expression of biological forces associated with the cyclical process of birth and duration, events initiating existence, symbolic sources of life, also of sexual nature.

It is also, or perhaps most of all, the obvious organic nature of the matter which sheets of paper are made of. It is tangibility of beaten down and soggy kozo fibres and, embedded in them, sometimes other organic items - traces of innervation permeating through the matter, ‘incompletion’ of frayed edges of paper and their apparent impermanence. Finally, it is the natural character of the process of their creation, a kind of ‘handiwork’ - a small studio in the country, where first paper is made in special vessels and then it dries in the sun. We could say that we face a kind of specific, spectacular ecology.

Some works, like microscopic slides or cross-sections of soil layers, can be testimonies of human curiosity, further explorations extending our knowledge about the world, though helpless against the vastness and complexity of the phenomenon of existence. It is not possible to describe the world in this way, the same way it is not impossible to completely control the paths which are taken by the pouring out coloured paper mass on the mesh of the mould, the mass which the artist uses to create her work. Finally there are many things which are juxtaposed here: the concept, speculation and control with intuition, chance and unpredictability. As in the real world there is a contradiction between order and disorder harnessed by the rhythm.

Numerous compositions focus attention on antinomy of different phenomena - contradictory shapes and colour combinations, reversed forms seem to indicate the complementary or excluding phenomena that function in nature. Triadic compositions emphasize dialectic and cyclical processes.

Ewa Latkowska-Żychska cultivates the traditional Japanese method of making paper. It is made in a complex process of production from the inner bark of the mulberry tree - kozo, purified, soaked and beaten down until it turns to mush. When scooping, the hand mould is immersed several times in the mush of fibres, which are deposited in several layers, until the desired thickness is achieved.

The Polish artist does not divide the act of creation into two phases: the technological one, when paper is made, and the creative one, where interference into the painting ground would be carried out. In the process developed by her, the act of creation starts from the first movement of the mould. The artist completes her work, immersing the mould many times in the following colour solutions, complementing paper with another portion of the suspension.

At the same time colourful components of the work are combined together in the most possibly controlled way; the artist uses templates, she modifies and multiplies the already used imagery motives. Nevertheless, she intuitively allows the vital chance to take part in the act.

The characteristic features of fibres, which the Japanese handmade paper is composed of, stimulate the absorption of paints and dyes. The material that is produced intensely absorbs colours. As a result the compositions are bright and vivid. They are characterized by intriguing light transmission, which is enhanced by the natural transparency of kozo fibres. The references to the Japanese culture do not only concern technological aspects of paper production. They are fully manifested by the special atmosphere of works, enchantment of seemingly prosaic phenomena, in attempts to retain transient moments forever, in adequacy of the position of elements which build the work of art, the precision of the message, in the desire to express the essence of things by means of a few highly relevant imagery motives.

Ewa Latkowska-Żychska’s artistic papers are like visual counterparts of the Japanese haiku. These features are also present in her poetry. Although formally her poems do not resemble the Japanese literary miniatures, they can be associated with them. Both the artwork and poetry are very intimate and personal. At the same time, however, their delicate matter is able to convey the universal problems concerning our attitude to the world and to stimulate our existential reflections. Papers comprise cycles, they are made into books; all the experiences and images that reflect them create an intimate, rich – though certainly never completed – message, they are an individual attempt to capture all the manifestations of amazement with and admiration for our existence.

Ewa Latkowska-Żychska’s works, which are sometimes difficult to classify, are certainly a part of the interdisciplinary trend of artistic search – they show both the element of spontaneity of drawing, the value of broad painting gesture and sometimes spaciousness of sculptural works. Her paper one of a king objects, extending the boundaries of that field of art, still remain the examples of original fibre art, in which organic fibers overlap and intermingle with one another, forming durable, flexible and beautiful material, which the Japanese define as a gift from God.

Dariusz Leśnikowski

Transl. Elżbieta Rodzeń-Leśnikowska