Each time I start creating a sculpture, I imagine someone who is real, a living person. A person, a character who has given personality traits, is in some kind of mood or does something concrete, looks around, thinks about something, is static or dynamic. I always imagine a specific person!
It’s like one frame from a longer film that I have in my head, in which this character plays a role. Later on, comes the time for the synthesis and then metamorphosis of all the details that can fit and define this person.
I give names to the sculptures, real names not designations, to me they are real people with distinct features and emotional states. Modest, shy, angry, longing, regretful, dynamic, curious, confident, interesting… anyone, someone, I could go on forever.
Lorelei, a beautiful young woman, with a fair skin and blue eyes, in a navy-blue dress turns her head ashamed when a man asks… Borint is such a bloke, he’s strong, athletic, fashionable. He’s a man holding an invisible string at the end of which there is a weight, the so-called ‘keep in line’. He takes care of his silhouette, of his ‘line’, he’s ‘perfect compared to others’ not keeping their shape.
The interpretation of anatomy and its variability, expressed by solid, sharp edges, I literally love sharp edges that form a line which I sought for a long time. Drawing, well I don’t think I can make a sculpture without a specific drawing on it anymore, it gives me an additional possibility of dividing the solid and that makes me really happy. Drawing enables me to give a different impression and that’s the final detail. Often in the relation with the simple solid, the drawing creates for me the final image of the sculpture as it was with the POSTHEAD work, where simple solids were completed by the drawing and its further division into other shapes.
Colour, after all, it’s impossible to create a transparent, invisible sculpture, there is always some colour. And if so, let it bring something, let it create a new space, or define something important, like the context of our thoughts, as I suggested in Flosig I sculpture. Inside its head there’s an openwork in a distinctive colour, maybe its thoughts are green? This sculpture is thinking about the question someone asked, and will answer but only has to think it over…
I don’t want to make difficult scenes such as what’s the meaning of life or worse, of death in human existence, it’s a kind of macabre… I’m more for breaking down into parts, simple emotions and gestures, behaviours. Everything that makes up the sculpture is extremely important to me, the form, shapes, drawing, colour and the composition that I sit on for many days, sometimes weeks, just to create this living figure that I saw in my imagination. I’m not entirely satisfied, I have a shape, colour and drawing to my disposal, great but, I’m still missing something…
Year 2006, defending my thesis, my post-cubist busts in one room, me and the professors in another, they attacked me in a pleasant way wanting to find out more, and my problems or rather the whole set of them in the third room. In the third room there was a post-cubist figure in relation to the film projected on the screen that has a human shape. There were a few problems I wanted to show, but one was the most important to me – a FILM!!! The last ingredient I missed while making sculptures, unfortunately still not obtained. Imagine vivid material, such as clay which has no colour, but is an animation, a film that you can make yourself, a bust for example, which is fading fog, flowing water, moving sand…that would be wonderful…
~ Konrad Ziolkowski
- Metamorphosis and Synthesis by Konrad Ziolkowski - 29th May 2020