We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sights. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places – retreated to most often when we are most remote from them – are long the most important landscapes we possess.
—Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
Branches of forgotten knowing
The exhibition branches of forgotten knowing is on one hand an exploration of place and memory; that of my ancestral homeland in Poland and the land, replete with a cherry orchard, that my Polish grandparents settled in Southern Ontario, while also widening out into a contemplation of the atomic.
The collection was realised over a span of 15 years – the earliest being of/spring created in 2009 with reference to cherry branches gleaned from my grandparent’s trees whilst the majority of works were created from 2023 and 2025 between Poland and Canada alternately – ever a dialogue in my mind between places, time, materials and gesture.
I grew up living next to my Polish grandparents in small town Ontario, amongst and surrounded by a cherry orchard, chicken coop and vegetable garden – which, I would come to realise many years later, emulated the rural village settings they left behind in South Eastern Poland.
Every July, my days were spent climbing old wooden ladders, my head navigating the leaves and branches, with wood baskets harnessed to my body, my hands would busily pick cherries. My fingers hold a kinetic memory of dexterity and repetition which continues to inform my sense of knowing.
An inner landscape, one that is rooted in the visceral imprint of the orchard, of living with natural cycles, and in equal measure, an inner landscape imagined and searched for in stories, letters, traditions and fields of South Eastern Poland, holds promptings from which these works emerged.
“Two years on from her stay in Poland, exploring the Podkarpacie area and its culture, this 2025 exhibition showcases some of the works led by her local discoveries, such as her development of natural inks and pigments gleaned from the surrounding area and pieces inspired by traditional embroidery and crochet patterns. The series of works, titled ‘Grand Mother’, evolved during the artist’s stay in Zaczernie, in a landscape inhabited for centuries by Tania’s ancestors and where her family DNA continues…The closeness and the distance between the two countries and their cultures are both playful and nostalgic. The mirror image of the cherry tree branches flipped as roots in the cyanotype installation, symbolise a stable heritage, but also the persistent changes in life.” Basia Keary, exhibition curator “
Each of the works is multifaceted employing different found and foraged materials. The grid and dot configuration of Grand Mother, reflecting on gestures of traditional embroidery, ploughed fields and seed sowing, was created entirely from materials gathered around Sala752 in Zaczernie. See more of the collection and read more here
Where f[a.l.low] contemplates the field and our relationship with natural cycles of growth and decay, ceremony and cycles, more can be read in a season in the field (more..) and in book culture: a season in the field II (more..)
Parallel to a personal narrative, where modern science acknowledges that every cell and every atom is recycled into another being, this body of work is also a story about a more subtle connection, asking into an atomic relationship with body, earth and time.
I think about how memory is carried through the gesture of the hand – and in particular, women’s hands creating delicate bobbin lace, embroidery and crochet inspired by living with close observation of natural forms, these patterns, an abstracted code, as if intuitively suggesting the molecular threads of connection. My works echoing, in a patterning of dots like seeds, cells, stars.
You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge…
—Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being
