Monika Sosnowska
In August 2022, we welcomed Monika Sosnowska to our Roberts Institute of Art Residency.
While in residence, Monika worked at a smaller, more intimate scale than is usual in her practice, exploring the local area to inform possible new lines of enquiry and making.
Monika used the opportunity offered by the residency to shift her attention from urban architectural projects, for which she is well known, to engaging with the rural environment in Scotland. She looked at the land and the way it has been designed, altered, excavated and managed by both human-led and natural processes.
Monika’s investigation into the organic ‘architecture’ of growth and decay took her to the James Hutton Soil Institute, Aberdeen. She met Dr Allan Lilly, Senior Soil Scientist, to discuss how the soil has been mapped and recorded, while learning more about the peculiar characteristics of soil as a substance that supports life and is itself a living, complex network. Her resulting sketches and models reflect these organic systems of development, growth and transformation, that ranged from the undergrowth to the tree tops.
Through drawings, maquettes and photographs, Monika documented the trees in the grounds of the residency that were felled by the hurricane that hit Scotland at the beginning of 2022, as well as the intricate web of trees and roots of both natural and plantation forests. These entangled arboreal structures recall the twisted, crumpled and interlocking networks of steel and metal seen in some of Monika’s large-scale sculptures and installations.
The sawn and split tree trunks and branches in her photographs alongside her clay, wire and paper maquettes reflect her interest in pushing material to its often-surprising limits in her previous work. One such sculpture, Pipe (2016), is part of the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, and is the subject of architect Tom Emerson’s Collection Study commissioned to coincide with Monika’s residency. With an architect’s attentiveness to material and scale, Tom looks closely at Monika’s work to think about translations between model and sculpture, urban environment and art work, ideology and physical reality.
A selection of these sketches and models together with her photographs can be seen alongside a specially commissioned text from Edinburgh-based poet, Anthony Capildeo. Anthony has written three poems after reflecting on how, with close reading and looking, the various forms and structures in Monika’s sketches, models and photographs seem to mutate and metamorphise, and lend themselves to poetic possibilities of metaphor.
This website uses cookies to ensure that you receive the best experience. Read our privacy notice.
