JANUARY 29 - FEBRUARY 21
“I can’t draw from my imagination, I can only draw what I see.”
The dichotomy of an unimaginative artist is perplexing, but it is an assertion Gosia Wlodarczak stands by. Her artistic foundations are rule-based, with constraints of procedure, environment and duration which dictate and drive her creative methodology. There is flux between projects, but rule prevails. As such, the world is Gosia Wlodarczak’s studio and anything is the subject. Her works are webs of overlapping imagery of everything that her eye encounters and her hand interprets. Simple yet complex interwoven linear drawings as an evidentiary act of the artist’s presence capturing the continuous present. Despite her self-proclaimed lack of imagination, the product of her traced lines from a flowing marker is both majestic and magnificent.
Space, place and time have underpinned Wlodarczak’s practice from the beginning. Famously rejecting the use of a studio, she inhabits existing structures and locations, breaking down and recontextualising their purpose through performance-based drawing interventions. Dissecting the environment as she draws, she challenges her eye to actively ignore the human urge to centralise focus on singular objects. In her artistic state, she draws from direct observation without conscious mediation. The resulting marks give rise to a unique visual language, where once recognisable elements of place merge into densely drawn entanglements. Space is flattened, overlayed, and stretched as it enters Wlodarczak’s visual perception. Every stroke echoes representation yet the amassed tangle of lines forces an ebb and flow between figuration and abstraction. An observed experience enmeshed into a net of deconstructed and reconstructed understanding..
The Wholeness In-between brings together two bodies of work from disparate artist residencies, five years apart, which in dialogue uphold an ongoing narrative of the artist drawing herself into existence.
In 2021, Gosia Wlodarczak entered a period of self-imposed isolation inside a small retail tenancy in Melbourne’s Royal Arcade. For twenty-one days, her only interaction with the outside world was mediated by the arcade itself, as viewed through the shopfront window. The duration of the performance expanded and contracted around mandated closures in a world where time was heavy.
During this residency, part of the City of Melbourne’s Flash Forward program, Wlodarczak methodically and intensively etched thousands of marks across walls, ceiling and glass façade. The accumulating dense strata of white lines that took shape as an embodied installation became inseparable from the imposed conditions of confinement, observation, and duration.
In the final days of 2025, Wlodarczak began her newest endeavour to weave herself into the fabric of time through observational drawing. She took up occupancy inside the vacant Gallerysmith space during its annual summer break. In seclusion, she spent twenty-two days living, sleeping, and performatively drawing within the gallery across cycles of daylight, dusk, and night. The outcome of this residency is a body of small works on linen, which record intimate fragmented details of objects within a dormant space.
Wlodarczak describes this suite of new artworks as a constellation, secluded pieces that hold greater meaning through their networked connection - an archipelago through time. Installed on the wall as floating celestial bodies, one’s eye is invited to find rhythms within and draw connections between the galaxy of stars.
Some of the constellation canvases contain ‘pocket drawings’. Mini scraps of cardboard and paper plucked from cafes and gatherings on her recent travels to Poland and Singapore - their surfaces imprinted with the immediacy of encounter. Elements of ephemera, small moments within Wlodarczak’s existence accrete as sedimentary layers in co-existing states on a single canvas. Time capsules of an artist travelling between continents, time accelerating and bleeding between past and present, a sum of everything that has come before.
These two bodies of work underscore the essence of Wlodarczak’s practice, drawing as a declaration of ‘being’, yet they are merely timestamps on a continuum. Every other intangible observation, experience, performance, thought and idea in the intervening period reverberates silently through the gallery. The life and times of Gosia Wlodarczak fills the wholeness in-between.