Artist: Magdalena Tryba
Curator: Adriana Markowska
When an artist’s studio itself becomes a curiosity, a kind of unexplained desire, the creative process begins to follow its own path. The room, the window, the worktable transform into a space of collecting—a space that, in itself, becomes a creative problem. Something to be found.
The titular phrase “Pockets Full of Stones” is a metaphor for the act of gathering, which, repeated many times, transforms each time into a separate journey in search of new places, people, and the stories connected to them. In Magdalena Tryba’s work, the emphasis is on the act of collecting and the constant search for form behind it. This distances the artist from objects understood merely as found objects. After all, colorful nurdles, a small skeleton of a plastic fish drifting in the sea, or microscopic debris mean little as waste.
Following the thought of Eliot Weinberger: “(…) flowers must have butterflies, mountains streams, rocks moss, oceans seaweed, old trees vines and creepers, and humans—obsessions.”—will Tryba’s creative process become clearer to us? Can the declaration of attentiveness it contains transport us into the microhistories of people and things the artist has discovered? Although objects continually change their shapes, disappear, and are replaced by others, the old saying suggests that “nothing is lost in nature.” What we are really dealing with is the constant migration of objects. A migration that, in the artist’s exhibition, takes the form of an artistic installation attempting to address the problem of space as encountered.
