This Showcase presents a selection of past works from one of the 2015 Jerwood/Photoworks Awards winners Joanna Piotrowska.
Within my practice I am interested in the reoccurrence of historical memory within social and environmental systems. For me, the creation of paradoxical imagery becomes a method for exploring this phenomenon; in my project 5218 the annual blossoming of wild orchards within the natural beauty of Poland’s Bieszczady region became the marker for the regions traumatic and violent past.
My most recent series, Frowst, explored the unstable formation of identity within the context of familial relationships through a series of psychologically wrought photographs. Inspired by family photography and more broadly systems psychology, the work embraces the dissonance of intimate gestures, a continuous oscillation between tenderness and violence, love and sexuality.
For the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards I will continue my interest in exploring psychotherapeutic methods such as process-oriented psychology as a framework to examine how sociopolitical factors affect people in their private lives and personal sphere. Through focusing on the perpetual state of anxiety within modern society, I would like to uncover the unconscious, long lasting consequences of historical events that intertwine with the current climate of potential catastrophe and unseen threat.
For more information on the JPA15 Awards please click here.
