Experiencing life, experiencing art

Katarzyna Zimna deliberately and effectively combines her creative work with an academic insight. She defines her approach to art she creates, ponders over the position of traditional disciplines and techniques, including graphic arts, in today’s digitalised culture. The artist studies relations between plenitude and presence or absence, between what is unique and repeatable in graphic arts, what is deliberate and accidental, permanent and changeable. The physical work on a graphic print becomes a simultaneous intellectual process; the reflection verbalised in the scholarly article is not only a transfer of philosophical constatation on paper.

In Katarzyna Zimna’s works the function of art as imagery, representation is confronted with the notion of art as an experience. The relationship between art and life has special meaning here. One could say that in this case the artistic activity becomes a component of everyday, ongoing life which is often in opposition to the creation as something ceremonial and special.

The artist certainly explores a wide range of issues, from the broadest, universal, concerning the world order, the conditions, effects and manifestations of its volatility, till the existential, including personal ones, of autobiographical nature. That kind of considerations not only provide us with knowledge about the author, contexts that determine creation of a work of art. The construction of these - often intimate - expressions also indicates the creative method adopted by her. Their analysis reveals to what extent the applied strategy becomes a useful tool to retain the experience.

The objective of this text is not to create a comprehensive monograph of Katarzyna Zimna’s artwork. When it comes to understanding her intentions, we have the support of the author’s texts. Therefore, we can focus on selected aspects of her creation to investigate how the declared approach is reflected in some specific works.

There is an array of works that define the space of the artist’s current experience. As a whole, they constitute the image of everyday life characterised by places, objects, emotional states, events. The artistic space becomes a part of this territory, designated in a special way, understood topographically and spiritually.

The individual contexts are obviously revealed, especially at the imagery level, as a set of recognizable elements that build a kind of ‘represented world’. In her works Katarzyna Zimna emphasizes above all what is ordinary, daily, not bombastic. For example, in her view motherhood is not only a manifestation of the miracle of existence, but also a state burdened with obligations and restrictions and transformation of one’s identity (Transformation). Not only is this attitude presented by the specific, purposeful selection of imagery elements, but sometimes also by the use of non-standard printing grounds; the artist has printed on a cotton nappy, a baby outfit, a tablecloth, napkins, filter paper.

The thing that is particularly important is the use of a trick of sequencing images that can be observed in a series of various graphics that were made of the same matrix (Transformation, the series of Microcosmos). The inevitable evanescence is marked by the following graphic works displaying the commonplace evidence of passage of time, such as the repeatedly portrayed ironic ‘soup of the day’ (Microcosmos), supposedly different every day, but still the same. There are more serious works that present changes which take place either in the widely understood nature or in the nearest environment that is subject to our perception. They are a kind of notepad, a calendar retaining the image of physical transformations, but also a repository of emotional memories of everyday experiences (November 1-6). The carefully selected colour is the factor that helps obtain the critical dimension of the composition.

The artist reaches the sequencing value through the use of matrices in different configurations, creating cycles of admittedly similar, yet still different works. Some single graphics, where there are multiplied module-like motives of the same type, that differ from one another with saturation, ‘sharpness’ of colour, have also a similar character. The works are then characterised by the particular rhythm, achieved due to heterogeneity of the same motives at the level of secondary characteristic features.

Many life situations temporarily reduce or impair the operations that have been carried out on a regular basis so far (also those connected with art, passions). Deterioration of continuity can be noted in a work of art thanks to ‘bringing to life’ the variants and sequences of graphics (in her texts, the artist pays attention to the ‘feminine nature’ of the printing matrix).

Their establishment and supplementation, continuous interference with the physical structure of the pattern attach processing features to the work (not just the product isolated from the preparatory activities), associating the prints with the form retained in matrices. It allows for capturing the experience as a record of a sequence of events taking place in time. Every interference becomes a trace of the physical, intellectual, emotional experience, certifies the condition of the creator. The processed imagery elements of particular compositions, the evolving components of the surroundings reflect in a natural way the character of common changes taking place in the artist’s space. The current experience is the real theme of the work.

Katarzyna Zimna’s works, interpreted from another perspective, also allow for recognition of the experience as a static construct (though certainly the components of that experience are dynamic in their nature), which is a state of human condition and awareness.

It is worth mentioning that in the artwork of the artist from Lodz records of emotions are spectacular graphic works, not like e.g. in Conceptualism, where the documentation itself was a testimony of the creative act, often devoid of aesthetic values. We pay attention to their composition or colour sensitivity, but also to the fact that they are an element of continuous artistic search; the reflections on the relationship between the absence and presence may be illustrated, for example, by linocuts where the image was created as a negative, exposing significant elements as bright motives against the dark background.

Thus, the effect of the process also turns into the testimony of the experience - a work which in many aspects of contemporary art is not a necessary element that constitutes the act of creation. Katarzyna Zimna’s activity unites the work of art and the process.

In her art the artist deconstructs the language shaping the image of reality. She points out that an important factor in this process is to create new notions and words. A collection of matrices may be helpful to create permutations - separate works composed of various combinations of signs.

The artist herself defines the grammar of the act of creation. It is worth saying here about the socalled phenomenon of ‘women’s art’. Instability is supposedly one of the features of ‘feminine nature’. It is also the ‘affliction’ of the feminine language, including the language of ‘women’s art’. In the case of Katarzyna Zimna it could be the predilection to subject images to the continuous movement and change.

It means a search for new words and notions in order to create a new gynomorphic language, also the belief that we can get to the essence of the feminine universal language of art exploring myths, symbols and archetypes located on the border of two worlds - the real and the supernatural one, on the border of language and culture (Alchemy. The Forgotten Language). Taking this point of view into account, we will probably be right to choose a group of works depicting the symbols of alchemy, or - subject to changes in subsequent versions - images of selected herbs, plants originating from ‘the secret garden’, associated (not only in folk culture) with representatives of the ‘fringe’ world, functioning outside the society, in harmony with nature. The artist does the same, trying to abandon some aspects of tradition and to convert to another culture.

Katarzyna Zimna’s creative action is an attempt to find a new type of relations between the field of art and the social space. Her works, including installations and other performative activities, tend to be close to manifestations of critical, involving and even participating art. They recall significant contexts, they make us ask questions, they trigger the viewer’s strong reactions. The artist gives up the attitude of separation of art from the real life and she gets involved in a discourse that goes beyond aesthetics. Some people define this new phase of art as ‘postautonomous’.

For Katarzyna Zimna being an artist is not just the matter of creation of images or objects. In art treated in this manner the visual sphere stops to be superior to the conceptual or practical sphere; the focus is on constructing a process rather than an object. The thing that we have to face is the condition of our awareness and the shape of our perception. The artist’s actions affect the change in the existing boundaries of what we are able to perceive in the space of our experience.

The artist has a definite approach to what change, an artistic experiment mean. Among other things, she considers the essence of play/game within the area of creative activities. She tries to find value in a difference, an error, lack of similarity. Do similar activities annihilate graphic art in its former character? They just seem to enrich it. At the same time they give it a little different status - it is a tool that consolidates the artist’s craftsmanship and experience.

Dariusz Leśnikowski

Transl. Elżbieta Rodzeń-Leśnikowska





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