Emilka Wolniewicz: The Chaos of Abundance
Emilka Wolniewicz is a Polish-American artist, writer, and researcher. She is fascinated by theories of fashion and objects, chaos, consumerism, text, collected materials, translation, beauty and wit, and how these entities merge together. Emilka uses material from packaging, informative labels, and magazines, as well as surrealist automatism and photography. Her practice investigates politics of consumer culture, magazines, advertisements, and temporality to create collages of digital weavings, code, garment construction, stitching, and embroidery.
How did your creative journey begin?
For me, art is a tool of voice. When I was first in preschool, I did not know how to speak English yet but I wanted to paint. I would roll my sleeves up and the teachers gave me an easel, paper, and paints. I found comfort through art and color in a space where I did not yet know how to communicate in. Moving through the rest of my schooling, I was primarily focused on math and science, but art was always a fascination of mine. In my free time, I liked to draw, paint, write, and embroider. During my bachelor’s programs in Nutrition and Human Physiology, I was a lab scientist and I studied the gut microbiome with an interest in dietary fiber. After graduating I seriously started working with acrylics, graphite, and embroidery and began to find interest in weavings and rugs. I taught myself frame loom weaving and punch needle rug making and fell in love. I applied to the School of the Art Institute Fiber and Materials studies MFA program, and, to my surprise, I began my program in 2022. Since then, my work has evolved into digital weaving, collaging, coding, handbag construction, and researching fashion. Evidently, I understood art to be the best way to showcase my ideas, research, and voice and I am very fulfilled with where I am today.
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
My fascination with advertisements and commodities began when I took inspiration from a “heart healthy and low cholesterol” bread label for a German multi-grain bread. The advertising was crazy with cartoon hearts and rather absurd phrases, and it made me laugh. I find inspiration from advertising, products, pop culture, media, consumerism, capitalism and socialism, American and Polish culture, and objects. Specifically, I am most influenced by the bizarreness of contemporary American consumerism. Advertising and product packaging are the most compelling, and something that I think should be analyzed and discussed. For me, art is a good way to capture my inspirations, so my work tends to be chaotic, stimulating, and storytelling, paralleling the cultural emotions and actions of consumerism. Working with theories of objects, chaos, language, and critical thinking add structure and cohesion to my work. Textiles themselves are also an inspiration through their innate meanings, abilities from manipulation, and textures. Textiles are precious, intimate, and are extensions of the body, encouraging me to create special and meaningful work. I also experience maximum experimentation since the cloth process can be continuously altered through color mixing, pattern organization, object making, for example. Maybe most importantly, textiles are sources of comfort and joy, which I search for in art.
How has your work evolved over the last few years?
I learn and process information through making with my hands. Examining my developments in craft over the last few years, there is more complexity, depth, and care to my practice. I started fiber arts from handmade looms and frames and led to working with weaving software, code, and garment construction. I never would have thought that I would work this way, but these mediums are now critical to my studio practice. My first weavings were frame loom woven collages with product packaging, plastic, discarded clothing, yarn, and a twig as a dowel. The tapestries were rather crudely woven, but I liked the effect it gave them. My first punch needle rugs were abstracted images of kitchens. I told stories of food and cooking, like ones of my grandmother making jam. I shifted away from rugs at this moment, but I am still a weaver and continue to find inspiration from advertisements, packaging, found objects, and food.
What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?
I do not have a typical day in my studio, and my studio is defined from what kind of environment I am in. I consider my studio a second home. I spend several hours there on my work, whether it is focusing on one project or working on many at once. I like variety, so my workdays vary naturally, keeping me stimulated and excited to create art. I also always have my notebook and pen with me to reference designs and notes and immediately write down thoughts. As a weaver at SAIC, I had the opportunity to work in the Weaving Lab at SAIC where I used the floor and Jacquard TC2 looms. This was a shared room, so my studio became a communal practice space. I spent a lot of time there, mostly evenings and nights. Later hours meant that the lab was peaceful allowing me to focus and work smoothly. Working there was comforting too because I was able to work alongside weavers, friends, and professors. I had two private studios prior to starting a home studio. I enjoyed working in a controlled studio space as I learned how to maintain a strong and sustainable studio practice, but I am excited to work at home and see how my practice evolves. I wonder how or if my art will change in a home environment that holds more intimacy, emotion, and ability to grow.
Which experiences have impacted your work as an artist?
As a researcher and writer, I have motivations for theory, critical thinking, and explanation. As a scientist, I search for truth, order, and repetition. And, as an artist, I make for beauty, voice, and history. I have the privilege to blend these sectors of myself to create work that is coherent and therefore fulfilling. As a self-taught artist, I value experimentation and am not afraid to work on my own individual level allowing me to mesh research and art to create work that is unique. Having a strong connection to my Polish American heritage also really impacts my work. I am inspired by my histories of Polish family virtues, rituals, and customs, as well as Polish politics and culture. My MFA thesis, Polish Resistance Fashion Art Movement, is influenced directly from my family and their relationship to fashion and textiles during the late 20th century in Poland. As acts of resistance from the communist regime, women and youth used fashion and do-it-yourself clothing to voice their truths while finding comfort through it. My family included. As I started learning more about Polish resistance fashion, I found a fascinating intersection of fashion, art, home-life structure, and local and world politics, economy, and culture, encouraging me to study Polish fashion and its politics, as well as my ancestry and explore how I relate and work with fashion. My grandmother - biochemist and embroiderer, especially inspired me to become a textile artist. While working as a hospital biochemist in Poland, she sewed and knitted clothing for her family and was a prolific cross-stitch embroiderer. She taught me how to cross-stitch when I was 9 years old, and my first piece was a purple pencil. My grandmother had these two paths in her life, and I think that’s beautiful. Her dedication to craftsmanship and decor is how I began to deeply appreciate textiles.
How has social media impacted your work?
Social media is a connection point to the art world. It allows me to communicate with local, national, and international artists and galleries. While at times stressful and overwhelming, I am grateful that I can find gallery exhibitions, residency opportunities, collectives, art markets, and events. While it is crucial to have a great website, I think that Instagram is also a good entry-point portfolio, where it is simple to see images, videos, and other updates about your work and process. Social media is also fun and personal. I like that I can share stories of my daily life, in-progress works, and my personality online. It is exciting for me to interact with others in a way that is also not strictly about my art practice. It is certainly important to my art career, but I am an artist first, not a content creator. I do not create for social media; I create what I create and then I share it with my audience.
Can you tell us more about some of the themes you explore in your work?
In my practice, there is always room for goofiness and seriousness, play and diligence, experimentation and order. My work depicts emotions of contemporary American consumerism. More specifically, I investigate politics of consumer culture, magazines, advertisements, and temporality. My work is monumental and can be overwhelming, paralleling the over-stimulation of product sales in pop culture and mass media. I also aim to create spaces fit for contemplation while evoking a sense of joyfulness through a wash of pink in my pieces. The art that I make is saturated with images, words, textures, and colors creating rather intense stories and analyses of commodity culture. The theme here is abundance. I use material from packaging and fashion and lifestyle magazines, as well as surrealist writing and photography. My writing always starts with a word; my recent writings have started with the word “decadent”. Textiles and media are themes in my work as well. Jacquard weaving is well suited to my work, particularly when overlaid with python coded videos, because together they form an intersection of slow craft, digital image, and binary code. The pieces preserve weaving and digital histories, as well as dialogue between woven and digital text, and take advantages of these histories’ strengths to appropriately question consumerism while also reflecting on temporality and domesticity. Overall, the themes of my work are the chaos of commodities, capitalism, and pop culture at large.
Website: emilkawolniewicz.com