East-East exhibition view, photo by Kamili A. Krajewski, copy by Manggha Museum

Dreaming the Remedy

This new series of silk works, dyed with colors derived from plants, draws inspiration from the tradition of totems and magical talismans, exploring the potential for collective healing through the lens of folklore and traditional practices.

Each fabric is dyed using herbs and plants with specific medicinal properties. I focus on themes such as fertility, protection, hope, and healing—archetypes fundamental to human existence, which, within Western culture, have gradually been stripped of their original function.

The works is shown as a part of EAST-EAST- exhibition of contemporary art from Japan, at Manggha Museum in Crakow.

“Her works in the East-East exhibition include monumental swaths of silk, dyed with pigments extracted from plants that she often gathers herself, as well as a series of watercolours that serve as testaments to transformation – both personal and material, physical. Skowrońska invokes the tradition of amulets, totems, and talismans – objects with protective, transformative, and magical functions in ancient beliefs. However, rather than reconstructing these rituals literally, she recontextualises them, allowing magic to play an epistemological role – a way of knowing and organising reality beyond rational discourse. Her textiles are not simple recreations of old beliefs but rather attempts to renew their relevance, redirecting their meaning towards contemporary fears and needs. In a world increasingly shaped by entropy and apathy, this return to ancestral energies becomes a gesture of social, even political, significance.

At the heart of this series lies the process itself – long, time-consuming, and unpredictable, demanding both precision and submission to the organic logic of the medium. Her method resembles alchemy rather than craft – yet it is an alchemy not in pursuit of perfection but of an alternative form of knowledge, one that emerges from the material rather than being imposed upon it. Here, significance is found not only in the symbolic meanings of the plants she uses to produce pigments but also in their tangible materiality – their decomposition, transformation, and responsiveness to the environment and time.

The series of watercolours Skowrońska created during the most personal and pivotal period of her life reflects an urgent need to record experience. These works were made while she was caring for her dying mother; without a studio of her own or even a large space in which to work, she sought a medium that would allow her to respond intuitively to reality. This choice – seemingly ephemeral, the antithesis of the monumental – becomes, through its immediacy, the most sincere and raw document of her process of thought and experience.” from curatoria text by Paweł Pachciarek

Photo credits Pawel Szazza Groczyca