Art | Kamila Szczęsna’s Scientific Sculpture of Insatiable Curiosity

Polish sculptor Kamila Szczęsna creates work that probes what it is to be human. Her art rests in a beautiful place between the known and unknown, asking many questions and providing no answers, resulting in an insatiable curiosity. Szczęsna received her Master’s degree from Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland in 1999 and now lives and works in Galveston, Texas. Her sculpture is in the collections of Ceramics Park MINO; Japan, Escuela de Cerámica deMuel; Spain, Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum; Taiwan, and the Centre of Polish Sculpture; Poland. Her art begins with an idea and she fits a medium to the needs of the project working with materials and processes including resin, light, drawing, transparencies, unfired clay, ceramic, and even cultures of bacteria harvested from her saliva.

“As a human I want to know; as a human I am drawn to what I don’t know. I use my work as a tool to understand reality. I’m attracted to science because it promises the comfort of knowing. But can life be described solely by diagrams and equations? I am interested in the mystery and poetry of scientific approach. I search for contradicting answers and for paradoxes. I look for the places where knowledge reaches its limits and is replaced by feelings and intuition. I claim my “terra incognita” trying to accept uncertainty and confusion as a natural state of being human.”

Kamila Szczęsna’s Flux sculptures are scientific studies probing the origins and insides of an unseen subject. The sculptures imply there is something to be discovered, a feeling that we as humans thrive on – the unresolved. Her work seduces with mystery recalling the recent Ebola-mania, where our fascination (obsession) was rooted in the unknown, the intangible, the aimlessness, the incurable. The Flux series, though, is more about curiosity than terror, turning the viewers into scientific TSA workers getting a veiled glimpse at a secret package.

Szczęsna’s process of creating the Flux series light boxes is very literally rooted in science, collaging images of cultures of bacteria harvested from the artist’s saliva, laser copies of scientific data describing human DNA, and photographs of her biomorphic sculptures and ink drawings. They are self-portraits showcasing the essence of Szczęsna, void of the superficiality of physical appearance. Although these product-finished pieces do describe “what Kamila Szczęsna is,” they do not describe “who she is,” a question she addresses in her Drive series.

The Drive series is a collection of ceramic cloud-forms that appear to be created outward from a hovering origin. They have no bottom or top or front or back and a downfall is that they possess weight at all, so gravity keeps them stuck to the table decided on a single position. In a related installation titled Process Szczęsna suspends a similar form in space, a massive 39-foot blob coated in unfired terra cotta slip. Where Szczęsna’s previous work is run through a series of filters that distance the artist from the work, the Drive sculptures are direct, hand-to-object. Looking at her entire body of work, the directness of Drive adds a much-needed consciousness to her question of identity. They succeed in infusing free-will, consciousness, and creativity into the work, but the dry, surface, amateur touch, and arbitrary forms are not visually interesting. The direct route that clay takes from the hand to the final piece eliminates the mystery of process, the factor that makes much of her other work so intriguing. Szczęsna’s ceramic sculptures are related to the word “molded” or “pinched,” while her drawings, resin, and light work are related to the word “growth,” work that, in this case, is far more interesting.

Szczęsna’s repeated sculptural success proves her versatility in material and visual aesthetic, making leaps in size, medium, surface, and color, probing into each facet of what it means to be human. Even if her Drive sculptures fall short visually, they are conceptually spot on, adding to her ongoing collection of biological curiosities.

Justin Crowe is a Writer-at-Large for CFile.

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