Monika Strozyk

Painting

Through personal visual study of interiors within my practice and the inability to access the feeling of ‘home’ in my everyday life led me to investigate the mechanisms I use to control space and anxiety within my life and my work. I’d like to think of my works as a representation of experience within my private interior spaces. Paintings act to communicate my experiences more clearly, not just pictorial, but materiality as well. My understanding of home currently has been formed through my perspective as an individual who has had to move many times due to situations out of my control. Due to these circumstances’ “home” has been a place where I've felt uncomfortable, unable to make it a space I can call my own.

The iconography used within my paintings, plants, candle holders or lights are illustrated in many of my paintings as a gateway for communicating a living space. Compositionally I'm interested in the phenomenology developed within architecture and how one can understand architecture from a philosophical perspective. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard ideas of space, home, and memory have greatly influenced my work as well as contemporary artists such as Maxwell Bates and Rebecca Belmore. Colour is another way I try to understand my personal relationship with “home” within my own domestic interiors. In continuing my practice, I wish to continue replicating my experiences and relationship with my living spaces , I hope in continuing my practice it'll lead me to the creation of a home.