Eliza Szylko
Statement
As a multidisciplinary artist I utilise printmaking, sublimation, collage, crocheting, rubbings and textiles to create an installation. My work is deeply influenced by Polish folk art and traditions, responding to reoccurring memories, dreams and images of a charged site; my grandmothers home in the Orawa Region, Lesser Poland. Events such as my grandfathers suicide are a major topic of conflict as I try to explore how this site, the home, transforms after such tragedies, whilst also navigating my own identity, with the idea of the home as a vessel of our inner inventory. I create fabric collages using a hybrid of images sublimated on chiffon alongside cyanotypes printed on textiles. These images are sourced from old shoe boxes filled with family photographs many taken around my grandfathers funeral or from his life before. Layered slightly askew on pale translucent fabrics, these images evoke a subtle dissociative shift, they are then stitched onto textiles reminiscent of Polish domestic traditions and edged with lace, offering a gesture off care to such stark memories. The deer skull in my work recurs as both a totem and an ominous marker of events which shaped the home. I draw on polish art practices such as wycinanki and pająki, to create cut out forms from paper and light fabrics, that emerge like elusive memories or otherworldly figures. These elements converge in installations that weave real and imagined spaces, forming a dream like terrain through which I process inherited traumas and memories, whilst also seeking comfort and clarity from this home-like memorabilia.