Investigating the tension between identity and socio-cultural hybridity, these multi-layered etchings depict an imagined landscape, from my perspective as a first-generation child of Polish migrants. Evoking a sense of memory, loss and post-war anxiety the work performs as a theatre; responding to the rejection and displacement I was exposed to when visiting family in Poland, July 2012.

Finding myself in the complex of au-delà, I am reminded by Homi Bhabha’s Border Lives: the Art of the Present.   Living in transition, where I refuse to leave behind the past, the unanchored protagonist recurs throughout this series as a traveller or lost seeker . The work has been suspended off the wall by using foam-core, creating emphasis on how figures ‘float’ out of time, intertwining past and present familial ground, with reference to photographs of my Great-Grandmother (1914-1930).
 

Carl Jung and his theory on collective unconscious, refers to the way we absorb the memories of former generations . Applying his logic to the mark making, as well as influences from German Expressionist Cinematography, my monochromatic palette, interspersed with highlights of red, ultimately speaks of a ‘patriotic’ fantasy. The repetition of motifs intends to suggest the unfolding of narrative, albeit an uncertain or unfinished story. Raphael Samuel’s phrase nostalgia is the sigh of the historically orphaned, resonates with my yearning for the ambiguous terrain of a fragmented homeland and my attempt to offer an ode to a perishing nationalist tradition.



1 Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) on ‘hybridity’ and ‘moving beyond’,
http://www.berk-edu.com/VisualStudies/readingList/13a_homi_bhabha_hybridity.pdf, 02.04.2013

2  Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) on ‘hybridity’ and ‘moving beyond’, http://www.berk-edu.com/VisualStudies/readingList/13a_homi_bhabha_hybridity.pdf, 02.04.2013
3  S. Walters 1994 Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, Volume 17, Issue 3, Algorithms and archetypes: Evolutionary psychology and Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, pp287-306
4 Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture v. 1 by Raphael Samuel, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Theatres-Memory-Present-Contemporary-Culture/dp/1859840779, 15.05.2013