Dorota Borowa

 “Ideas come to us as the successor to griefs”*

I made this Water Drawing on paper in collaboration with water in 2022. I didn’t like it. It seemed to be falling apart but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. I kept it. In January feeling overwhelmed and longing for the Arctic experience I came across this piece again, folded neatly in the corner of my studio. I looked at it from a different perspective. “By the end of my stay the cold had transformed me too. Some places are just like that. You come back different or perhaps you don't come back at all” says Doreen Cunningham about the Arctic in her powerful book “Soundings. Journey in the Company of Whales”. I stuck the work to the wall and started drawing around it directly on the wall with self-made charcoal. I couldn't stop. The drawing started taking over the space and me within it. Now I wanted it to fall apart in all possible directions. I needed to explore where it would take me. I know that at some stage I will have to wash the wall and paint it over but the temporality constitutes an integral part of this piece.

This quote by Marcel Proust which I found in Deborah Levy's book "Cost of Living": “The ideas come to us as the successor to griefs” kept me drawing further and further.

Ideas come to us as the successor to griefs
Site-specific installation, 2024, dimensions variable, studio shot. Includes Water Drawing 3 (130 × 200 cm; movement of water, oil, natural pigment, Fabriano paper) and charcoal drawings on studio surfaces made with charcoal sticks crafted from oak branches collected in Kenmare, Ireland.
* Marcel Proust (after Deborah Levy Cost of Living)