Artist Window: Ania Troszkiewicz
This month, our Artist Window features the work of Brick & Mortar member Ania Troszkiewicz, whose ceramic sculptures explore our connection to the animal world, drawing on everything from Slavic folklore and magical realism to motherhood and her work rescuing rabbits.
Ania’s work is deeply personal, so we’ll let her take it from here. In her own words:
I am Ania Troszkiewicz, a Polish ceramic sculptor, rabbit rescue volunteer, and reproductive health activist based in San Francisco. I’ve been making sculptures at Brick and Mortar for 2 years now among the wonderful community of fellow ceramicists.
I make art because living in a hyper-modern, sanitized western society has made us forget that we are animals. My work is a reclamation of the primal soul. I use dark magical realism to explore how returning to our animal nature is the only salvation from the manufactured and tech-enabled cruelty of the human world. Our species’ dreams of wealth and power are literally dooming life on Earth. And it’s very depressing if you don't have a way of doing something about it. I made sure I do my small part: through my art, my volunteering and my work. Maybe that’s why I still have so much love towards the world, while still allowing myself to feel the darkness so deeply.
Having grown up in Warsaw, a landscape heavily layered with centuries of Slavic folklore, city legends, pagan-Christian rituals, and profound historical trauma of WWII, my internal world remains "thick" with ghosts and wonder. In my work, you’ll see eerie creatures, looking with an iridescent stare straight at the viewer. They make you question who is really being observed and who is the observer. You’ll find a piece of bone with human teeth with real gold fillings, making you think about our annihilation driven by unsatiated wealth growth culture. There is a larger than life strong hand, maybe of baba yaga, maybe a female werewolf. She is finished with delicate fur like carving and pink glaze, looking both fierce and gentle. She is holding a sprouting life from a fava bean between her curved claws as if in awe. There is also a theme of vulnerable herbivores like rabbits, the underdogs of the world, the bottom of the food chain, turning on their predators in an act of cosmic justice.
Rabbits are my kindred spirits. I’m part of a small “guerilla style” rabbit catching group called Oakland Street Bunz. We save hundreds of dumped and abandoned domesticated rabbits, crawling under houses and squeezing behind rusty junk at 5 am on the weekends. We undo the evil of other humans. I have my own rabbits from Save A Bunny, a rescue that my husband now works at: two of them were strays found with serious wounds from cats, one was a confiscated abused “meat rabbit”. I use their hair from gentle grooming as part of my ceramic sculptures as the only cruelty free animal product I use as a vegan. It’s unbelievably soft, and contrasts beautifully the rock-hard clay material that is fired to extreme temperature in the kiln. So my sculpture of a human-animal mother with a child I made in clay has a nest of fur, just like rabbit moms make for their babies. I’m a mom myself to 3 humans and birthing and raising kids is simply mammalian, but also magical and so profoundly powerful.
It’s hard to tell where one of my many roles and practices ends and another begins. It's all connected and rooted in the same ethics of deep daily commitment. If I can make art, raise kids, save bunnies and work towards a better world, then I can die a happy human, or rather — a happy animal.
Much Love.
Ania
