Joanna Piotrowska on A Moment Of Darkness At Noon: 'I feel I am entering a new chapter'
Another feast of contemporary art has been laid on for this year’s Glasgow International. Greg Thomas kicks off our coverage by chatting to Joanna Piotrowska, a collage photographer whose work has moved from the allegorical to the ambiguous
‘I first used collage in 2022 and since then I’ve been drawn to the juxtaposition of different realities that it makes possible.’ The photographer Joanna Piotrowska is giving me the lowdown on her Common Guild show, a Glasgow International exhibition which unfolds through to mid July. Polish-born and London-based, she established her profile with sombrely gripping, staged domestic scenes, in which women’s bodies seem subtly contorted or confined. But she has recently been turning to a time-worn trope in modernist and surrealist photography: collage.
One landmark project of Piotrowska’s is Stable Vices, an exhibition which began at Kunsthalle Basel in 2019 with an accompanying photobook which launched in 2021. It included, among other sequences, images of women in postures from self-defence manuals; arms and faces were gripped, in some cases, by invisible male hands. This cool evocation of structural misogyny was accompanied by shots of dens and shelters which the artist asked people to build in their houses and gardens; there were rings of sofa cushions and a blanket draped over a writing desk. For an artist born during communist rule in Poland, a country scarred in recent years by rising Christian nationalism, the idea of seeking a shelter deeper and more hidden than that afforded by your own home struck a quiet but unmistakeable polemical note.
Perhaps Piotrowska has projects such as Stable Vices in mind when she says that, ‘in most of my earlier shows, I wanted to create a conversation between new and older works’. But with the turn to collage, something has shifted. Displayed at The Common Guild, A Moment Of Darkness At Noon will mainly feature pieces in this new format. ‘I feel I am entering a new chapter, presenting works that are more ambiguous and difficult to contextualise. They are like dreams. They aren’t what they show; they represent emotional states.’
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The change in mood from allegory to ambiguity means the work must stand alone. It also correlates with a new-found interest in Jungian psychoanalysis, in which ‘dreams hold a significant place. In dreams, there are no linear perspectives; geographies, objects and faces blur into one another’. Piotrowska explains she was ‘in a state of mind resembling dreaming’ while preparing the collection, ‘relying heavily on coincidence and intuition’. This is appropriate for a medium (photographic collage) which has its roots in female surrealist pioneers such as Dora Maar, their work steeped in theories of the unconscious. In the same vein, bricolage elements added to the works, like ‘little glass pieces and other accessories’ are ‘recreations of objects from the past that evoke an uncanny feeling in me’.
The works included here speak to the feelings of uncanny coincidence, of trusting to chance and a sense of flow that the artist describes. Enlarged images of women’s heads feature strongly, often placed against backdrops showing interiors or textured landscapes. At the same time, we can spot motifs of bodily contact and control carried over from her earlier practice: hands grasping one another or a face cradled too tightly in a pair of arms. The artist has worked with The Common Guild’s space to create an atmosphere redolent of both dreaming and, perhaps, the acting out of Jungian archetypes. Walls are covered in dark soft textiles, the room intended to give the sense of a stage, but scattered and fragmented.
For Piotrowska herself, an artist entering her 40s, the theme of ageing is very much to the fore with an elderly female head looming large in one image. ‘Perhaps the most important idea I have taken from my interest in Jungian psychoanalysis is the notion of liminality, crossing from one state to another.’ This is connected to the feeling of being in midlife transition en route to an unknown destination: ‘perhaps that’s where I am now’.
Joanna Piotrowska: A Moment Of Darkness At Noon, The Common Guild, Glasgow, until Saturday 18 July.