Flowers

Flowers by Małgorzata Markiewicz are, in a sense, a documentation of her performances carried out in gallery space. All alone, the artist removed her clothes, and the garments, seemingly carelessly dropped from her body to the floor, created colourful compositions reminiscent of blooming flower buds. The final result is as important here as the act itself, as the latter leads to the creation of objects. The boundary between intimacy and everything that the artist perceives as non-intimate is one of the elements that define the impressional and semantic ambivalence of Flowers.

Threads, fabrics and articles of clothing constitute the basic media utilised by Markiewicz. Both in the traditional approaches to history of culture and the feminist critical approaches, these things are associated with the activities and creativeness (including amateur artistry) of women. Markiewicz does not distance herself from these connotations; quite the opposite, she actually underlines the connection between the materials she uses and their identification, long established in culture, with female expression. Speaking of textiles and clothing as a “second skin, an envelope that people assume”, she comes close to the approach to clothing demonstrated by anthropologists of objects and historians of material culture. In their view, costume is never neutral with regard to meaning, but constitutes a tool for shaping one’s identity in the public space. In the case of Flowers, however, the social aspect of clothing is downplayed, while the issue of relations between a person and things in the private sphere is brought to the fore.

Objects made of articles of Markiewicz’s clothing have a strongly individualist character, and the artist’s biography seems to run parallel to the biographies of things. These meanings are imparted on Flowers by the gesture of an intimate performance: just taken off, garments retain the body’s scent, recall its shape, to which they have had to adjust, and between the twists of the thread they hold tiny flakes of cuticle. The sensual and erotic character of the work, perceptible at the first contact with it, may after a while give way to discomfort arising from a feeling of overstepping the boundary of another person’s privacy. This feeling seems far stronger when faced with the objects themselves than with their overly aesthetic images, lightboxes with photographs of Flowers. Markiewicz’s intimate work is therefore not only another addition to the debate on women’s art, but also a reflection concerning an individual’s identity-related integrity, as well as interpersonal relations and the means and rules that shape them.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz