About

AZ was born in Poland. She moved to Scotland in 2006. She continues to live and work in Edinburgh. She has worked across painting, photography, recently concentrating on ceramics sculpture. AZ works with simple means and unfussy, but very particular approach to materials and art practice. She is a recipient of RSA Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Travel Scholarship (2011) and a professional member of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. 

I think art, if it’s meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.  

John Baldessari 

Sculptures

AZ ceramic works seem to be at odds with times they are made in. Figurative, relic-looking, simple in form and not attention grabbing. Playful works (with at times funny titles) are executed with economy, modest in scale, with few, sparse details. Minimal, not overworked forms, somehow have presence and feel deliberate. They could have stepped out of the cartoon or have been an unearthed artefact. Goddesses, creatures, guardians, many women, some men, spiritual, totemic-looking objects of worship without disclosed story or provenance; without usefulness or function. AZ works are whimsical, at times puzzling, her influences are nuanced, but they resurface regularly varying from ancient to contemporary and anything between. She works with one off hand-built forms mainly in earthenware.  Since 2023, she has been experimenting with work in bronze.

Painting 

AZ’s paintings are a dialogue of minimal and colour.  Her paintings are inseparable from drawing: ephemeral, tactile - to the point of looking casually scribbled.  They are raw, flat, immediate, “unconcerned with finish”, rough. They are as immediate, as they are restrained: in number of colours within one work, in the way they are unscrupulously edited out to the final set /series linked by a title.  Her work carries something enduring, recalling graffiti, carving or a scroll. 

Photography

Her photography started with looking at photographs and photo books. After making her first photo book at the foundation year, she has continued to work in photography, slowly establishing independent photographic body of work.

She has worked in photography in parallel with other aspects of her practice, approaching projects with book form in mind. Her photography focuses on blurred line between reality and representation, negotiating space between witnessed and surveyed by camera and what is retold as a multi-layered story. She often plays with photographic working methods, challenging the limits of photography to be an objective, believable witness. Her photographs explore ideas of how we look, what we choose to see and how we process visual in world saturated in images.