From Left to Right:
Untitled, Mixed media with an egg shell, 6 x 13 x 6 cm
Untitled, Mixed media wirh lemon rind, 8 x 18 x 6 cm
Untitled, Mixed media with a glass cherry, 6 x 12.5 x 8 cm

N Z-T
The two run parallel in my life. I went to art school first and I was a full time artist with occasional side-jobs for a few years. Eventually I realized that some aspects of my work have very practical applications plus I needed a regular pay check. Also, I think I'm the kind of person who needs to be out in the world. I don't think I can sit in the studio 24/7 and stare at my navel. I need to be with other people and I need to feel useful in the world of work somehow. So I became a textile conservator.

N Z-T
Mid 1990’s. Although I was in a painting department, I started making 3D objects almost immediately. No one objected, I think it was clear to everybody from the start that's what I should be doing.

N Z-T
I tend to use discarded, ordinary or domestic objects which appeal to me in some way. It is partly to do with growing up in the final quarter of the 20th century in Poland. Using poor materials was European art at the time, but in Central Europe it was mainstream, born out of very real circumstances. It was already encoded into the culture by the historical events of the 20th century and before, an ongoing personal and collective attempt at resurrection. I think I just absorbed that aesthetic, before I knew what it meant. It's one of the ways in which collective trauma is passed on—it is absorbed, morphs over time and adapts to new realities. It becomes part of the language. In my case, it became part of my art language even though I personally haven’t experienced much collective trauma. So far. Lucky me.

N Z-T
The atmosphere of loss and reconstruction was simply in the air. And that fact was often directly referred to: the surviving objects stood as witness to those recent sweeping events and their ongoing consequences.

Polish art and literature is full of it. I don't want to glamorize it because there is a big problem in building a personal or national identity on a sense of loss and victimhood, as we all know. It's as potentially harmful as building it on a sense of power or superiority. I’m just describing a fact: if you are forced to repeatedly reconstruct the present from broken fragments of the past, those fragments become very important in themselves, part of the atmosphere and the language of art.

N Z-T
It’s part of a continuum. Remaking and reconstructing something which is damaged or no longer useful is a very potent tool for making meaning. In the case of the Bags for Life it is about our current horrified fascination with the growing detritus of civilisation which is now threatening to choke the planet. But Bags for Life are still an attempt at a resurrection, at finding value, beauty and meaning in something considered useless, spent and discarded.

And I’m also interested in the tension between so called ‘noble’ and ignoble materials. Specifically, the idea that important or universal themes are somehow better contained or expressed through marble than a torn shopping bag. There is a world of social, political, economic and patriarchal assumptions there I want to scratch at. It’s not a new idea but it turns out these hierarchical assumptions are very tenacious. I want to do it through nuanced, visual means. I want each object to be a work of art not a manifesto.

N Z-T
I think I know what you mean. In different settings, the works can be put together differently to tell a different story. Each piece is autonomous but it shares the space with others. To me they are like actors in a wordless play. Again, I think this is probably heavily influenced by the Polish 20th century avant guard tradition, especially the work of Tadeusz Kantor, a Polish theatre director and artist who used ordinary objects. I saw his plays when I was still a child and they had a profound effect on me. The performance and the space seemed to me to be one single organism.

It was not a case of human actors speaking lines, surrounded by a set. It was highly orchestrated chaos in which the props were actors, the actors were props, the set changed shape and Kantor himself sometimes remained on stage during the performance, continuing to direct, or perhaps using himself as a prop. So I think it came from that. But each actor to be a fully realised individual, not merely a cog in the machine. It is very important to me that each piece, when removed, is a coherent work of art on its own merits. The objects have to be as well and as elegantly made as I can possibly manage.

N Z-T
I was always interested in skill and the craft inherent in art, but my skill set improved exponentially when I trained to be a textile conservator. Learning about the properties of different materials helped me to know how to manipulate them without compromising their essential nature. That’s the goal, anyway. I don't aim to have total control over the things I make. I want them to still have some identity and agency of their own, though don’t ask me to explain exactly what that means. One of the ways I try to achieve this is that I never break anything on purpose. The damage has to have happened by itself; I only respond to it. It’s an artistic conceit designed to stop me from taking myself too seriously. It wasn’t a conscious decision in the beginning, I only realised that I’m doing this retrospectively, but now it’s part of the process.

N Z-T
This also wasn’t entirely conscious in the beginning though it certainly is now. Society tends to prioritize certain characteristics over others as though they inherently play a larger role in creating the world. We think that strong, loud, large, long-lasting, big, dangerous are the really important qualities, whilst malleable, foldable, shapeshifting, delicate, ephemeral, nuanced, slow, considered things which are highly responsive to circumstances but also affect them without some single heroic moment of conflagration, are somehow less important. I don’t buy it. I think that all those qualities are strengths. This is one of the reasons I love textiles. A textile is a flat thing which usually hasn’t the strength to stand up on its own, and yet you can hang buildings from it.  Individual threads have very low tensile strength yet in a complex network of a weave – they can carry many tons of weight. They are versatile and malleable enough to allow us to make extremely complex three-dimensional objects, such as clothing for example, which can adapt to movement, the environment and take a lot of wear. Tailoring is a form of body engineering. Until recently, you could judge the technological development of an extinct civilisation by the methods it used to produce textiles. The first ever computer was a loom…etc. I could go on. We tend to think of textiles as ephemeral but archaeology as well as engineering prove otherwise. It seems I’m interested in materials which endure despite expectations.

N Z-T
They are different but there's something they have in common: Both are seen as delicate yet they are also very strong. Glass is strong because of its rigidity , impermeability and resistance to heat but it shatters easily, whereas a textile is fluid but it bends and stretches long before it breaks. I often use things with opposing strengths in combination — organic and inorganic together. I’m very aware of the core characteristic of materials, so I exploit the opportunity for creating meaning from these juxtapositions.  But to be truthful I think I see them as partnerships not juxtapositions. Different strengths working together.

N Z-T
For sure, though I'm not a person you’ll ever hear say that form is content. I understand what’s meant by it but taken too literally it’s led us down a very boring and limiting cul-de-sac. Form can be instrumentalising.  In a considered work of art it should function as one of the essential components. I’m rarely convinced by work in which form dominates, though there are exceptions.

Anyway, artists often aren’t sure exactly what they want to say or how to say it until they do and even then – not entirely. Mostly we’re just tinkering with the tools and materials we have gathered out of need to communicate a thing we only fully understand through the process of making it. Formal constraints help me to decide if something is working or when it’s finished. I have to be convinced that the elements workin together, that the thing in front of me is now a coherent,  self-contained being. The ideal would be if the objects appeared to have evolved by some as yet undiscovered natural process.

I want these things to be made with attention and care as well as to be beautiful, to bring pleasure. Humour is important too, it welcomes people in.

N Z-T
Generally the things I use are already beautiful to me, so I clearly find damage and loss visually compelling in some way. Damage implies an event, a story, the passage of time so part of the narrative is there already, before I start.  That narrative quality of ordinary objects is a large part of what makes them so important as evidence of human activity, why we collect and study them. They are subject to the same reality and go through the same events as us - we can see what we’ve been through by what they've been through. I find scars can be beautiful for similar reasons.

As an art conservator I don't generally make objects whole again, my remit is to make them safe for as long as possible. I am supposed to preserve them so that the damage helps to illuminate their history whilst slowing down further deterioration as much as possible. It’s a balance of conflicting priorities. And so I guess I do that in my artwork too, although I have unlimited licence about how  and what I put together, it’s an antidote to the rigors of museum ethics.

N Z-T
Yes, both in light of and despite that history.

N Z-T
That's very interesting that you say that, because you may have just explained to me why, despite really liking Joseph Cornell's boxes, he doesn't quite ever get to me.

I think that I'm in some kind of a relationship with the object I’m making, that we’re on the same level. I've never expressed it in that way before, but I think that’s true.  Some artists seem to coexist in the world with their work. Others seem outside or above it, they are the creator, like a god. I think I’d like to be the first kind. If that makes any sense.

N Z-T
Yes. That's very interesting. Thank you, that's really very illuminating for me.

I’m hoping that that what makes my body of work coherent is simply that it is an honest extension of who I am. I don’t know if that’s enough. If people ask, 'Why do you like this or that artist?' I can't always answer sensibly except to say that I trust that artist. It’s a strange word to use and obviously deeply subjective, I trust that they really have shown me something of themselves as honestly as they could. Vulnerability and some kind of risk is part of it somehow. Some time ago I was talking about this with a friend who collects art and he said that practicing artists collect differently, they use different criteria. That struck me as interesting.

N Z-T
Erm…Rebecca Horn, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Wladyslaw Hasior. Kantor of course. These are nailed down. There are of course many, many others including artists I know personally and who I repeatedly work with. At the moment I also like William Kentridge though it’s not unqualified.

N Z-T
No, someone who urgently needs us to know something. And you can see that in the work.

N Z-T
No. I already had one. But I knew I had to do something to retain the freedom to continue. I chose something that would be compatible with art because I was also a young mother. Although I have the most collaborative and supportive husband possible, both of us were in the same situation. We had a small child, a mortgage and no financial cushion. We both worked, so there's a lot going on. So I wanted to do something that didn't completely conflict with the art, I didn't think I'd have the psychological space to do both. It took longer than I thought for the two to connect. I thought it would be instantaneous. In reality it took a good few years before the conservation allowed me to start making artwork again, because it was so all-consuming. I fell in love with it so completely that I stopped making my own work. And I needed to establish myself professionally, that was the whole point of it after all.

N Z-T
Almost a decade, I would say, until eventually the art just started coming back. And suddenly it was a bit different, because it was informed by the conservation.

N Z-T
Yes. I knew so much more about museums and the world of collecting. I had much better practical skills and crucially I had much deeper understanding of the materiality of things and how that connects with culture and context.  I'd instinctively felt that this is important in my work but I couldn’t pinpoint or articulate it. So I understood myself as an artist much better through the subject of conservation, and it's been wonderful.

N Z-T
Previously there was more focus on restoration. There still is but there is a stated difference between the two. Of course at times they blend together, you can't keep them entirely separate because conservation is based on the idea that you minimize physical interference within the object and that anything you do could be reversed. But that's not really possible. If you vacuum a very dirty object, you can't keep the dust and at some future date replace that dust exactly where it was. Just for starters. So it's always an informed compromise. The most important thing about a museum object is its context. If the audience can't see what this object is or represents because it is so damaged, it loses its purpose. It’s a balancing act between the physical demands of the object, its safety/longevity and its meaning, in which aesthetics play a large part.  A lot of big treatments do include considerable aspects of restoration for that reason.  

N Z-T
Yes, the ethics of conserving are a combination of practical skill, science, detective work and ethical enquiry which can get quite philosophical and political, especially when you enter the world of museums, which has a cultural and political dimension. I didn’t fully appreciate it would be like that, and I love it and it had a large impact on my art.

N Z-T
People very often do. Nostalgia is pretty universal and therefore a good entry point. Most of my objects function as secular relics, and the fact that they are redolent of an ordinary, domestic past most of us share, seems to relax and invite people into the work.

It was interesting when Eastern Europe opened up in the early 90’s and people used to come for weekends to Krakow, Prague, Vilnius. The mismatched aesthetic was immediately taken up in the UK. It existed here of course but not in the mainstream. Suddenly huge numbers of cafés, bars, restaurants and even high-end shops started decorating everything with mismatched chairs and different tablecloths etc. Domestic décor changed too. Industrial salvage boomed.  It was briefly called Iron Curtain Chique. I saw that phrase used at Harrods of all places.  People paid a premium to simulate scarcity. So that aesthetic lost a lot of its true meaning, right? But I think the longing that made people respond to it was real and genuine. We all instinctively understand the many messages in “make-do-and-mend”.  It’s not unique to any one place. And then the aesthetic took another turn: society became concerned with the amount of rubbish we are producing. So now it's about rubbish, about excess, about saving the world from the detritus of civilisation. So the aesthetic travels and adapts to new realities but at the very base, the core of why we respond to it remains. That’s universality.

N Z-T
What I like is that lace stands for an incredibly laborious, and skilled process but the plastic bag is a mass-produced throwaway object. I’m putting them together because they're more interesting in conversation with each other than they are on their own. People went blind and ruined their bodies making lace and didn’t get paid nearly enough. There is this rather cruel aspect to that level of human investment in beauty and value, versus the equally cruel but much more instantaneous investment in the plastic bag, which creates an interesting tension.

N Z-T
I have, because there are a lot of wedding dresses in the world. But also I worked on a lace exhibition for the Benaki Museum in Athens. The Victoria and Albert Museum were lending quite a lot of lace to the Benaki Museum in the early 2000’s. Many pieces needed conservation and specialist packing to travel to Greece. As a newly minted conservator, I was part of a team who worked on that. I learned a lot about washing very old lace. It was scary.

N Z-T
Well, I have to come across them, so that's the biggest chance. But after that I have to choose to work on them. Sometimes they wait several years before I suddenly have an idea. Part of my process is to periodically look at all the things I’ve collected, it takes a couple of days and often leads to new ideas because I see some of these things anew. Rebecca Horn had a studio big enough to have most of the things she collected out on display, easy to find at all times. I am jealous of that. My studio is very nice but small.

About menace and danger—life is dangerous and scary. Some juxtapositions come from the shock of recognition: like the extraordinary similarity of a bullet case and a lipstick holder. The relationship between the real violence of the bullet vs. fear of female sexuality, even a performative, supposedly compliant femininity as expressed by red lipstick.  There is that ridiculous saying: “The female of the species is much deadlier than the male” which applied to humans is just nonsense.  There is this underlying narrative that female sexuality is secretly more dangerous than overt male violence though no one will spell out exactly how.

The narrative is that there is some kind of equivalency between violent need to dominate and refusal to be dominated, even though there obviously isn’t.  It’s a good magic trick, isn’t it? This kind of projection and inversion of moral logic is so ingrained, it’s such an intricate network of total nonsense that if you try to unravel it – you are the one who appears insane. I suppose I am often searching for ways of expressing that somehow, without being too literal. I can’t really think of a more universal issue, yet talking about it is treated as a niche interest. Just talking about your own life while being a woman is considered a side issue and as such – a political act in opposition to the main narrative.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Mixed media with lipstick and powder compact, Dimensions variable