| 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. |
pronouns | she/her |
contact@joannawierzbicka.com | |
| @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 | |
| 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 | |
| 2024 | Eaton Fund |
| 2021 | |
| 2020 | Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship |
| |
| 2025 | Radio Relativa |
| 2024 | |
| 2023 | |
| 2022 | |
| 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