A4 Graduate Award 2019 • Magda Oleksiewicz is the winner of the 2019 A4 TUD Graduate Award.

While in college Magda’s work focused on the role of fine art and craft in migration, multiculturism, and identity through the lens of her own experience of being local to Poland, Bulgaria and Ireland. She investigated the potential of craft as a universal language and its potential significance in understanding commonalities and shared experiences between cultures. Fragments is a continuation of this work and sees a departure from historical references to personal experience.

In Fragments Magda attempts to understand her experience as a migrant in relation to her locality in North-Inner City Dublin; the day to day reality of this place, and Irish society as a whole; its history and its collective memory. Magda also draws on the experiences of her daughter and her peers, exploring how multicultural identities shift and change in the children of migrants born and raised in Ireland. Magda tries to understand the role of art, craft, acquired histories and languages in how identity is formed and performed.

The theme of these reflections is the landscape that we create together every day. Magda employed materials local to her from scraps and leftovers of personal use to fillers, pigments and varnishes from her local hardware shop in the creation of a body of work consisting of textiles, ceramics and paintings.

“Looking at old photographs that I am surrounded by, I ask what determines my perception of family tree ancestors and ancestors ‘acquired’ over the last 15 years since I have been living in Ireland? Who are my daughter’s Bulgarian grandparents ghosted in snapshots from fleeting visits to pompous christenings and weddings? Did they happen at all?

“Whenever I am among friends whose beautiful lives began thousands of kilometres away, one thing in my head is interwoven: an everyday craft. It is a quality of nothing that makes our existence extraordinary, unique and meaningful.

“Graffiti, embroidery, woodcut, sewing and furniture restoration, small vegetable garden and bee houses, prune preserve and fresh raspberry juice, Vietnamese soup from a small restaurant on Capel Street. Fragments.”

www.fleastudio.com

Workshops

An important element of this exhibition is the conversation around our shared cultural landscape. Magda invites the audience to engage with and reflect on their internal landscape and collaborate in the drawing of this shared landscape in the gallery.

Materials employed by the artist will be available for the duration of the exhibition to gallery visitors, including paints, fillers, fabrics.