statement
I work across sculpture, photography, and installation, with a particular focus on fabrics—used clothing, printed, or dyed textiles. I create sculptures that explore the interplay between soft/hard and tension developed through the genre of body horror, where forms resembling intestines, organs, organisms and monstrous shapes emerge.

Through my work, I emphasise matter as a living and active participant of reality. I am interested in human and non-human bodies and the wider material world of uneven and porous interactions we are in. Through the lens of biological processes such as composting, digesting, and breathing, I explore the dynamic relations of our bodies and how they extend beyond the skin. They are not fixed or isolated, but rather fluid and in constant dialogue with the world. I ask what runs through, across, and beyond them, how other agents affect us. By questioning the stability of the individual body, I address the global and material impacts of late capitalism and climate change, and how they shape, and are shaped by our embodiment.

Food has been a recurring element in my work, serving as a material starting point. I gather organic waste, forage, collect friends’ hair after haircuts, approaching this process with the care and attention of a meal preparation. These materials are either developed into physical objects, photographed and then printed to create a new sculptural form, or used as dyes.

Central to my practice is an engagement with monstrosity and otherness as categories for navigating posthuman and postnatural conditions. Rather than treating monstrosity as a deviation to be rejected, I approach it as a lens through which dominant ideas of the human, the natural, and the normal can be unsettled. Historically, monstrosity has functioned as a mechanism through which racialised, gendered, disabled, colonised, and animalised bodies are marked as excessive, threatening, or disposable, logics that continue to underpin ecological destruction and species hierarchies. My work reclaims monstrosity through softness, playfulness, and embodied disorientation, using speculative forms to trouble bodily and species boundaries without claiming access to non-human experience. I am interested in how these hybrid figurations can generate moments of estrangement and bodily slippage, inviting ethical reflection through sensation, ambiguity, and distance rather than empathy or identification.

My work invites visceral, tactile responses, creating metaphors for how we co-emerge with other forms of matter, performing a dance between various agencies. By navigating the intersections of opposites, self/other, internal/external, I draw on the concept of the abject.
I seek to evoke the sensations through which breakdowns in meaning disturb definitions, highlighting the strange power that suggests we are drawn to that which repels us.

pronouns  
she/her
e-mail
contact@joannawierzbicka.com
instagram@Joanna_wierzbicka
Education
2025

Postnatural Independent Program, Institute for Postnatural Studies, ES

2019-21

MA Photography, ECAL, École cantonale d'art de Lausanne, CH

Solo exhibitions

2025

Window Gallery, Bomb Art Factory Foundation, London, UK

2025

Project Octagon, London, UK

Selected group exhibitions
2025

Subteruge, Jedna Dva Tri, Prague, CZ

2025

A Hundredth Link in a Chain, Outhouse Gallery, London, UK

2024

The Way of All Flesh, Saatchi Gallery curated by Delphian Gallery, London, UK

2024

Ever-evolving echoes, Upper Ankyle, London, UK

2023

I may have bitten off more than I can chew, Generation & Display, London, UK

2023

Meat Market, London, UK

2023

Inverted Corneum, The Split Gallery, London, UK

2023

Inaugural, Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London, UK

2022

Stworko-typka, Sanford Vitrine, London, UK

2022

Do you remember me?, Jedna Dva Tri Gallery, Prague, CZ

2022

Setting the Stage: Photography as Object and Prop, Lunigiana Land Art, IT

2021

Moving Body Film Festival; Critical Moves, Varna, BG

2021

Verzasca Foto Festival, CH

2021

ECAL Diplomes, Espace Arlaud, Lausanne, CH

2019

Why do it together when you can do it alone?, Lewisham Arthouse, London, UK

2018

Nothing left to be saved, Photography Institute, Warsaw, PL

Residencies

2025

Unidee, Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, IT

2024

A-Z Summer School, ING Polish Art Foundation, Burdąg, PL

2022

Petrohradská Kolektiv, Prague, CZ

Awards / Grants

2024Eaton Fund
2021

Innovate Grant

2020

Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship


Press / Publications

2025

Radio Relativa

2024

Mold

2023

Ofluxo, Kubaparis, Szum, Easttopics, Ofluxo

2022

Tique Art, Artalk

2021

Photoworks, Guest Rooms, T Magazine, British Journal of Photography

2020

Camera Austria, Gaze Magazine, Tank Magazine


* design & code Giulia Boggio
  typeface Tomato Grotesk by Andrea Biggio