Dimensions: 34 x 42 x 17 cm
Signed, dated and described on the attached certificate: '"Zofia Kielan - Jaworowska. | Portrait" | Sculpture made for | Women's History Museum Foundation | author: | Marta Wlaźlińska | technique: | ceramic sculpture polychromed | with iron oxide and ochre | dimensions: | 34x42x17 cm | weight: 8.5 kg| With gratitude | Marta Wlaźlińska | July 2024'.
Literature
"Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska is an extraordinary figure for me, and although our paths are very different I felt a certain closeness with this outstanding Polish paleobiologist. Several years ago, while exploring female themes in culture, art and social life, I became interested in archaeology and the earliest sculptural images of female figures.
The heroine of my sculpture searched in the desert sands for the earliest evolutionarily evolved mammals, I search for the Primordial Goddess, trace traces of the pre-matriarchy in the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras and bring these inspirations into the world through my art. The way the figures are depicted, but also the materials used in my work - clay and natural polychrome of iron oxide and ochre - are the element that connects us both. The earth is that physical medium through which we both bring non-physical concepts into the world. She in science, I in art."
MARTA WLAZLINSKA
Biography
Graduate of the State High School of Fine Arts in Szczecin. She gave up art to study literature at the University of Szczecin, where she reclaimed women's work that had been marginalized from the historical-literary process. She explored goddess myths and female archetypes, which she later harnessed for artistic work.
She has co-authored women-related exhibitions in Szczecin's cultural institutions; several hundred of her sculptures are in private collections around the world, mainly in the United States.
She searches for the indigenous element that binds social structures together, and is inspired by primitive cultures, tribalism, indigenousness, ancient rituals, shamanism. Her sculptures are an area mainly devoted to women in a kind of tribute to them. A woman's emotionality, her strength, power, essence, the ancestral spirit that permeates her are qualities she endows her heroines with, helping herself and other women regain their voice in a patriarchal world. She is fascinated by the sculptures of the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, which seem to tell the kind of story of women that put them at the center of the life of ancient communities.
