Wyrwa

Wyrwa is an exhibition of new works by Joanna Piotrowska that rove uneven terrains of memory, fractured and refracted, lucid and overgrown. These new series', mounted in bespoke steel, aluminium and glass frameworks, comprise images made over the summer in the town where Piotrowska grew up; childhood drawings, folded and overturned; and close-cropped fragments from her father's negatives tucked behind sunset-tinted glass.

Drawings and paintings made by Piotrowska and her cousins as children form the bases of new collages incorporating polaroids, small prints, stickers, marbles and ornaments, two mounted within hand-blown glass frames made in collaboration with Jochen Holz. Glass reoccurs as a central material throughout the exhibition, no longer an invisible film. Here, it is protective, yet just as (if not more) fragile than that which it protects. Its presence is felt as guard, surround and lens.

These unique assemblages – collections of souvenirs, recollections and tchotchkes, combining materials from the past with images made in the present day – have the air of a scrapbook. Just as Susan Stewart writes in On Longing of the condition of the souvenir as enfolding a simultaneous intimacy and distance; as something that 'both mourns and celebrates the gap between object and context of origin', the condition of Wyrwa is the presence of a gap where something once was. This gap is a site of nostalgia, but most of all it is characterised by longing.

The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.

Black and white snapshots of Piotrowska's hometown, mounted in stainless steel, hone in on instances where boundaries and infrastructures are breached by wear or overgrowth. Curbs, roads and turf muddle, trees and shrubs climb through wrought iron fences and gates, ground swallows concrete, flowers and weeds nudge through paving stones and manhole covers.

These images speak to a sense of memory as a changeable landscape, lived in and so subject to the same wear and tear as the physical environments around us.

Expanding on Piotrowska's use of family archives, the works that line the perimeter of the second gallery space repeat the same image seven times around: a sunset filtered through a wild spray of tree branches. The image is taken from a photographic print taken by her father before her birth – one of the few possessions left behind after his passing. Piotrowska scanned the image and created a negative which was then enlarged and ultimately reframed.

The series closes the distance between his eye and hers, his composition and hers, his memory and hers. The resulting image has the hazy, out-of-focus quality of a recollection once-removed.

The seven sunsets are further filtered by sheets of coloured, hand-blown glass in a spectrum of dusk tones. Held at a distance from the wall with…