For years, text has held a central position in my practice, not as explanatory notation or description, but as material held to the same standard as the work itself. Through a sustained investigation of language, I came to understand words as spatial agents, capable of constructing potential physical and psychological spaces that both frame and inhabit a work.
This interest gradually evolved into a desire to dissolve the distance between text and object entirely, to allow language to exist not alongside the work, but as the work itself. What eventually emerged, through paper and watercolour, was a body of works in which text ceased to describe and instead began to act, turning inward, becoming self-referential, concerned with its own presence rather than with anything beyond itself.
On Alicja
I am currently developing a new body of work in Warsaw, centred around a collaboration with Alicja, a tattoo artist I met at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej). Something in her presence, an unstudied, self-possessed style, a quality that resists easy categorisation, struck me immediately as material for the work I was trying to make.
I approached her and asked whether she would be willing to take part in a new video piece. From that first conversation, I recognised in her a rare kind of inspiration: someone who carries herself with the unplaced familiarity of a film actress from a film that does not yet exist.
The intention is to document Alicja within her own environment, allowing the video to hold her as she is, while the accompanying paper works, text on watercolour, respond to this footage and to our ongoing exchange. The text is derived directly from our conversations: fragments of what Alicja has shared with me about her life, and our correspondence on Instagram. It does not aim to describe her. Instead, it is treated with the same material weight as the image itself, extending the enquiry into language that has defined my practice for years.
Alicja has agreed to be followed across the next five years, for as long as I continue returning to Warsaw. This durational structure, a portrait built slowly through repeated return rather than a single encounter, has become the foundation of the new work.
Alongside this, I am currently searching for other individuals, of all genders, willing to be followed in the same way: to be documented within their own environments over an extended duration, and to enter into a correspondence that will, in time, become part of the work itself. I am not looking for subjects in the conventional sense, but for people willing to be present to a slow, returning gaze, one shaped as much by conversation as by the camera. Each portrait will unfold on its own timeline, built through repeated return rather than a single sitting, and will carry the same weight I have given to Alicja’s: the text and image held together, neither illustrating the other.
My video works try to capture the poetry hidden in everyday actions: a body resting on a chair, a person crossing a room, the pause before a door opens. They follow a fragmented reality: scenes that don’t always explain themselves, but are held together by a red thread running underneath.
Each scene stands on its own, but together they take on new meaning.
I’m also drawn to the absence of the human figure in my work, though I don’t force this. I record what feels essential to record in the moment. Atmosphere, as in my other work, is something I return to again and again.
Sound plays a central role in my video works. I create my own soundscapes, but I also collect and record fragments I encounter online, layering the found and the made into something new. Finding the right soundscape often takes time, it’s a slow process of listening and testing until something feels right.
It’s in the video work that I feel all the different threads of my practice come together, and where my relationship to text takes on a new dimension. Though many know me primarily as a painter, video has become the larger part of my practice. I consider myself a video artist who also paints.
Thank you for looking
Next, I’ll talk about composing music in GarageBand and my growing interest in collaborating with other musicians, bringing their music into my video works, and inviting them to play live at the studio.
