White Desert is a speculative landscape, suspended in time and space. The installation draws on the motif of the garden as a site of imagination, resistance, and transformation. Within the white desert, under near-laboratory conditions, we witness the emergence of a new ecosystem. The organisms that inhabit it hover on the threshold between plant life, animality, and abstraction. These nascent life forms await classification, while everything is coated in a strange, toxic dust.
The work is inspired by Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness — Prospect Cottage. Created on a barren, stony shoreline beneath a nuclear power station, the site stands as a raw and poetic landscape, shaped in defiance of environmental conditions and the logic of survival. On a narrative level, the installation also references the literary worlds of Italo Calvino, where space and time fracture, and matter takes on the qualities of dream, memory, and metaphor. White Desert is a place in which imagination operates as a form of survival.
Sunspot, 150 x 150 x 20 cm, plaster, dry pigment, 2023
Presented on exhibition Orbium coelestium, De revolutionibus ideas, Cracow, 2023.
Currently on display in Larisch Palace, Cracow.
Sunspot is inspired by Georges Bataille’s story The blue of noon and the crucial role of sun motif in author’s works.
When I was a boy, I loved the sun; I used to shut my eyes and let it shine redly through my lids . The sun was fantastic – it evoked dreams of explosion. Was there anything more sunlike than red blood running over cobblestones, as though light could shatter and kill? […] My eyes were no longer lost among the stars that were shining above me actually, but in the blue of the noon sky.
I shut them so as to lose myself in that bright blueness. From it, fat black insects spouted forth in buzzing swarms[…]
I opened my eyes. The stars were still covering my head, but I was maddened with sunlight. I felt like laughing […] So I had laughed, and it was no longer merely the gloomy boy with his cruel pen who was walking through the night hugging the walls: I had laughed the same laugh as a child, convinced that one day, since such a lucky insolence was sustaining me, it was I who was bound to turn the world upside down – turn the world, quite ineluctably, upside down.
Georges Bataille, The blue of noon, 1935
Volcanic desert, installation, plaster, cardboard, dry pigment, dry ice, 2020
Presented on exhibition Open your mouth, give me a wink, F.A.I.T., Cracow, 2020.
