Shifting Positions developed after Kaczmarek completed a three-month residency in Leipzig, Germany earlier this year. Kaczmarek collaborated with Master Printer Maria Ondrej to experiment with superimposing images of natural plant life and more mechanical, manmade imagery into collaborative plates, which explore moments that are collaged to blend and overlay with each other. Kaczmarek’s series Pflanzenkunde, shown at the end of her residency in a successful exhibition at the Spinnerei, reflected on the artist’s time and experience in the country where she fostered inspiration of natural and fabricated worlds as intersecting. Kaczmarek recounts her experience by saying: The way the Leipzig community live with plants in their windows, clearly visible and backlit by their apartments became a prominent feature in the Pflanzenkunde series. Returning to Johannesburg and the eclectic nature of how things grow in the subtropical climate, coupled with the lack of being able to see into people’s homes, my focus has shifted to looking more to how plants are cast and where they land.For this new body of work, Kaczmarek’s paintings and prints continue to examine the sensibilities and relationships between people and nature in the interplay between the aesthetics and psychology that bring plants into living and working spaces. The work deals with an inquiry into the displacement of plants and their evolution in unknown environments. The artist has, over time, developed a fascination with the separation and closeness of the natural world created within our lived environments and our attempts to carefully package these surroundings.
The images developed for Shifting Positions continue from the same perspective. The artist is fascinated by moments where her engagement with plants renders a series of imagery which appear to grow and develop into her work. In turn, the works are curated into careful colour combinations and specific positioning within domestic spheres in order to decolonise the human relationship with cultivation through her practice as an artist. Whether they are welcomed inside our home or provide a reminder of the beauty and wildness of nature, plants linger in the cultivated spaces as we keep them contained, not allowing them to grow too wild or too dangerous so as to disrupt our sterile interior worlds. Kaczmarek is a professional printmaker, painter and educator based in Johannesburg. The artist obtained a BA in Fine art from the University of Cape Town, Michaelis School of Art in 2012 and completed a Masters in Technology from University of Johannesburg cum laude in 2019.
