Artist statement

Niusia Winczewska is a Polish-born self-taught and newly developing contemporary ceramic artist, with an upbringing in South Africa and formal graphic design and marketing career in the non-profit/environmental sector in the UK. Her experience and vocabulary in graphic design, illustration and publishing informs her work, all of which have found their way into the medium of clay and mark making. She draws images from the deep well of the natural world, giving form to expressions of the creative process, the embodiment and self expression that comes together through the medium. She hand builds intricate and elemental ritual and functional objects that highlight the beauty and fragility of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Engaged in animistic practices that explore forgotten, ancestral pathways of relating to our environment, she relates each ceramic piece with the land around her, and has started creating site-specific land art that calls attention to the dialogue between the inner and outer, the human and more-than-human, the mind and matter, and the transcendent and material worlds. Her joy in the medium was quietly unearthed during the various lockdowns of COVID, and continues as a meditation bridging these various subjects, deliberately connecting with this earthly material in search for a sense of calm, beauty and self-expression in this age of climate crisis and species extinction.