Joanna Wierzbicka

She works across sculpture, photography, and installation, with a particular focus on fabrics—used clothing, printed, or dyed textiles. Her sculptural practice explores the interplay between soft and hard materials, and the tensions that arise within them. Drawing from the aesthetics of body horror, her work gives rise to forms resembling intestines, organs, organisms, and monstrous shapes.

Food is a recurring element in her process, often serving as a material and conceptual starting point. She collects organic waste, forages, and gathers materials like friends’ hair after haircuts—approaching this act with the same care and attention as preparing a meal. These materials are developed into physical objects, photographed and reprinted as sculptural surfaces, or processed into natural dyes.

Her work positions matter as a living and active participant in reality. She is particularly interested in the relationships between human and non-human bodies, and the porous, uneven interactions that define our material world. Through the lens of biological processes such as composting, digestion, and respiration, she examines how our bodies are not fixed or isolated entities, but rather dynamic, permeable systems constantly in exchange with their environment. She asks what flows through, across, and beyond the body—and how other agents affect and shape us.

By questioning the stability of the individual body, she addresses the material and global consequences of late capitalism and climate change, and how these forces are embodied and enacted through lived experience.

Her work invites visceral, tactile responses—creating metaphors for how we co-emerge with other forms of matter, performing a dance between various agencies. Navigating the intersections of opposites—self/other, internal/external—she draws on the concept of the abject. She seeks to evoke the sensation of meaning breaking down, disturbing established definitions, and revealing the strange, magnetic power of that which both repels and attracts.