ALEKSANDRA KOSOŃ
BIOGRAPHY
I come from Poland, a country in which art is very traditional, and a great deal of attention is placed on developing manual skills and realistic mappings of reality. I graduated from the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in
Krakow - one of the oldest art schools in Europe. In recent years, I have been developing my skills in techniques
such as life drawing, painting and printmaking. After graduating, I started looking for something different to
what my university offered – a place where I could develop my art and projects in a more conceptual and modern way. It is for this reason that I decided to come to London to undertake a MA degree in Fine Arts at Central
Saint Martins.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My research interests and artistic practice include such areas as perception, representation, and how those
concepts can be translated into a piece of work. I try to explore the analogy of picture perception and to present
a visual expression of it as a sequence of images. I am also interested in documentation of our surroundings
which have a basic impact on how we sense and see the world around us. My main focus concentrates on a
landscape, especially on its structure and texture which I find really fascinating. One of artists I admire-Olafur
Eliasson in his essay ‚Seeing yourself sensing’ (2001) wrote:
What I have come to know better is my own relation to so-called nature, my ability to see and sense and move through
the landscape around me. (...) There is no truthful nature, there is only your and my construct of such. Just by looking at
nature, we cultivate it into an image. You could call that image a landscape.
It poses an interesting question on how we perceive things and how can artists manipulate viewer’s perception.
It is a conceptualization of the relation between the artwork and the viewer and the spatial, temporal conditions. It is an active negotiation of reality. There is not a sharp line between presentation and representation.
WORKS
Dream V
The lightbox was created in response to the concept of „non-space”: a place that cannot actually be entered because it does not exist on a physical level, but it can appear in our mind mind and imagination. It consists of four
sreenprinted perspex sheets with images of an imaginary landscape. While making this piece I also wanted to
experiment with the medium of printmaking- to create a three-dimensional work and transfer my images into a
form of installation.
Step Naked into the Garden of Virtual Delights (group exhibition, hARTslane, London)
For this project I created an installation of flat sculptures surrouded by sand and rocks. It was showed together
with a projection of futuristic landscape. Moving images were being projected on the walls and the sculptures.
The idea of this project was to create a piece of landscape inside the room. The use of different materials like
stand, paper, rocks, together with technology makes the whole installation nostalgic and distopian. The piece
questions the idea of representation and its meaning in our perception.
Other Stories,
An experimental project in which I used photography to create abstract images. I was interested in obtaining
unusual effects and make the photographs look more like paintings. I was playing with different types of materials like foil, transparent boards, paper and light. I used simple objects to create complex compositions that go
beyond the traditional role of the medium.