Contemporary Australia: Women

165 Each day, Gosia Wlodarczak’s Facebook page lists where and when she will have coffee. It always includes a photograph, taken by her husband Longin Sarnecki, of what she is wearing for the occasion. Sometimes the photographs are posted retrospectively, with some additional commentary — whether the coffee was good, who it was shared with, if the venue had to change. In the images, Wlodarczak poses like a catalogue model, showing off an array of looks that range from cutting‑edge fashion to down-home casual, but always displaying a sense of enormous pleasure in the act of dressing up and its visual effects. As we track her different outfits, venues and companions — the postings imply an open invitation to join her — we get the sense that the regular coffee date is also a constantly shifting affair, subject to endless permutations and possibilities. Scrolling through Wlodarczak’s Facebook page reveals not only a wry and lovely document of her daily ritual, but also a map of the artist’s movements as she traverses her home city of Melbourne and beyond. Both aspects of this online project are intimately linked to Wlodarczak’s most visible artistic practice, that of performance drawing, which she has been concerned with for over a decade. Her series ‘Personal Space Safety Zone’ (2001–present) and ‘Shared Space’ (2005–present) use the act of drawing to create what she calls a space of ‘security and personal safety’ within a contingent sphere of social relations. 1 Conducted in private or public environments, the performance drawings are made in real time with an audience who become participants in the event and are registered in the final drawing. Using ‘tightly knotted nets of imagery, thickly woven webs of line’, 2 Wlodarczak documents the situations in which her own body and those of others are enmeshed, in an attempt to freeze continuous moments and visualise the fluid interactions between people, objects and space. For Wlodarczak, the act of drawing is an extension of her bodily functions. It is a process that engages her entire being, not just the hand and the eye. As Ian McLean has written, Gosia’s hands, like her eyes and head, are equal interconnected parts of that integrated meta-system of the body’s skeletal, muscular, respiratory, nervous, sensory, cardiovascular, lymphatic, hormonal, endocrine, reproductive and urinary sub-systems. It is this whole anatomical package that, in her drawings, moves through the world. 3 Her drawings, therefore, do not depict a pre-existing image or narrative, but attempt to trace the presence of her body in a particular space and time. This presence is subject to external as well as internal forces: the dimensions and environmental conditions of the room, the reactions of others, the artist’s own physical and emotional state. These elements drive the form of the drawings, which, whatever the surface or context, contain Wlodarczak’s signature line — intricate traceries that are here densely bundled, there sparse and open. The lines mark and re-mark, continually calibrating and adjusting. When viewed from a distance, the drawings look like billowing clouds, or intensely detailed maps; when studied more closely, fragments of familiar images emerge, such as faces, hands, furniture, letters and numbers. Drawing, like writing and speaking, is a fundamental mode of communication, and Wlodarczak’s work reflects a strong desire to elucidate and express the complexities of human interaction. It has been suggested that this impulse is in some part informed by her personal experience as an immigrant to Australia from Poland, in which she had to learn new forms of social exchange. This involves not only ‘acquiring a new language but also grasping the codes that govern intricate social relations and the sharing of space’. 4 Wlodarczak has spoken of her desire to be ‘present within language’ and to explore the space ‘between languages’. 5 By creating situations in which she communicates with others through looking and drawing, she is able to move beyond language and its problems of translation and interpretation, to register the shared moments that unfold between her and others. She is not trying to explain or describe what has been, or what will be, but rather create a constantly shifting index of the present, as she senses it. Gosia Wlodarczak Poland/Australia b.1959 Gosia Wlodarczak during FROST DRAWING FOR KALLANG performance 2011 Ten-day drawing performance at Old Kallang Airport, Singapore Biennale: Open House , Singapore. Photo: Longin Sarnecki Image courtesy: The artist, Singapore Biennale, Singapore, and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne Gosia Wlodarczak Gosia Wlodarczak Body lines