Szklarki. The Body in Tensioned Material 

Szklarki is an exhibition by three women artists whose practice bridges craft, technology, and art; they work in a material burdened with the history of gender divisions and notions of who “should” be working with it. All summer, at SIC! BWA Wrocław Gallery we will be presenting ten of the artists’ works, using glass to speak of the body and the identity in its broadest understanding: social, cultural, and gendered.

For many decades, the medium of hot glass, which requires strength, coordination, and teamwork at the kiln, was solely reserved for men. The Szklarki exhibition rejects this conviction with an assortment of works by Marta Byrdziak (PL), Maja Kitajewska (PL), and Sadhbh Mowlds (IE), which speak of the body in a state of perpetual negotiation, and of appropriating techniques burdened by a gendered history. Byrdziak and Mowlds adopt the glass work’s intense rhythm, keeping in close contact with the liquid, pliable material — something viewers will have a chance to witness the day after the exhibition opens, during a demonstration of hot glass sculpting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław Glass Works. Byrdziak’s works are odd, phantasmagoric pieces, somewhere between the grotesque and object Surrealism, with a touch of camp. Her practice engages with the affective dimensions of the female body and sexuality. Mowlds creates objects that recall woven tissues — growing, transforming, mutating — structures with an uncanny aesthetic, working at the limits of the body and of corporeal intensity, which curator Anna Raczyńska connects to feminist body horror. Kitajewska chooses meditative work in the quiet of her own apartment, patiently making pieces from tiny glass beads, shaping a bead-making technique associated with “women’s handicraft” into a full-fledged sculptural strategy. Using a technique culturally assigned to women, she makes shapes that remind us of female body parts, human organs, or forms from the world of flora and fauna. The juxtaposition of these diverse practices shows how technique shapes the reception of a work and how established divisions create hierarchies within the medium. 

In all these pieces, glass is a tool for reflecting on the body and its entanglements. The szklarki (Polish for “female glassmakers”) show that glass is not neutral: it responds to touch, pressure, and temperature; it registers tension, resistance, and traces of work. Their pieces show how diverse languages can coexist in a single material — from dynamic shaping to organic growth and constructions formed in a slow, thoughtful rhythm. The exhibition’s subtitle, The Body in Tensioned Material, indicates these works’ shared point of reference. On the one hand, it pertains to the tensions in the body, conceived as a defensive mechanism bound to stress, emotion, and physical overload or poor posture. On the other, it directly references the technical properties of glass as a material working under constant pressure.

Recommended minimum age for exhibition visitors: 13+.

Accompanying events:

The exhibition and accompanying events are co-organized by the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław.

About the exhibition curator

ANNA RACZYŃSKA – a transdisciplinary visual artist, lecturer, and researcher whose practice focuses on sociopolitical and sociocultural issues. The transformation processes in Central-Eastern Europe occupy a key place in her work—from the legacy of Soviet communism to the development of neoliberal capitalism in mass society. Raczyńska tracks the structural tensions between the city and the countryside, technology and nature, work and capital, money and status, and the complex power relations described in intersectional theory. A crucial field of her most recent art and theoretical research is the concept of work, both in its material and non-material aspects, and from a feminist standpoint, emotional work. Drawing from feminist theory and critical work studies, Raczyńska demonstrates the close ties between affective, relational, and care practices and the global economic systems. As such, her work reveals the tensions between the abstract logic of capitalism and the experience of the body, emotions, and everyday life.