An environment interweaving elements of visual art, soundscape and light, first presented at the Ikikata Gallery in Podkowa Leśna, Poland, in 2024.

The gallery space was transformed into a multisensory composition - once visitors’ eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the room and the dimmed, focused lighting, they could immerse themselves in a space that allowed for the emergence of an intimate, individual poetics of sensory experience, in dialogue with the metaphors of life, dying and death, and the vitality immanently contained within them.

 

 

The visual aspect of the presentation took the form of an installation composed of multiple painted panels, whose surfaces incorporated paint, sand, and finely ground plant and animal remains. The works were displayed flat on the floor, surrounded on all sides by a thick layer of fine sand. The abstract compositions, rendered in a warm, intensely luminous pink-orange-red scale, suggested forms reminiscent of gravestones and functioned as focal points within the freely arranged space. With the viewers’ gradual interaction, the surrounding sand softened the edges of the paintings, transforming them into radiant vortices within the granular landscape.

 

The conceptual point of departure for the environment was a passing remark in Miranda Shaw’s study on the role of women in Tantric Buddhism (Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism, Princeton University Press, 2022):

 

‘… and to penetrate beyond the apparent solidity of so-called material objects to their indeterminate fluidity, which makes them malleable by ritual acts’

 

In the context of transformations associated with the passage from life – to death – to life, the environment sought to poetically articulate the idea that embodied beings themselves constituted an inner space in which a continual ritual of liquefaction unfolded — a ceaseless dissolving of boundaries, and the binding and unbinding of energies.

A particularly intriguing yet delicate challenge lay in sustaining a field of meaning around the work that remained as fluid as possible: in allowing for – and protecting – indeterminacy, so that participants could bring forth their own associations and readings, in resonance with their personal philosophical and religious convictions concerning life, death, transience and regeneration, as well as with the metaphors and intimate dimensions of the symbolic imagination.

The site was intended to remain a space for the unfolding of a poetry-of-nothingness; a space conceived with the viewer in mind, yet without imposing unequivocal responses – allowing for the preservation of the right to opacity and for the internal veiling of lived impressions and meanings.