Maps and Borders

Through maps, I explore how the personal is political. I was born in one country and grew up in another. As an adult, I moved again, during and after my studies. After having kids abroad, I moved once again, constantly questioning if I could be both a foreigner and at home at the same time. I speak, read, and write Polish, English, and French. I intimately understand that identity isn’t limited to geography, and through diasporic lenses, I laugh over shared Polish expressions pouring from my mouth in French cafés.

It wasn’t until a 2010 artist residency on a border zone between France and Spain that I formally embrace mapping and dislocation in my work and became interested in representing physical borders and embracing their metaphorical potential. I made works about temporary homes and transit, natural defensive borders, and conflict zones. At various points in my career, I have returned to the theme of mapping and borders, exploring human scales of measurement and experience, how identity shifts over time, and how individuals are alternately both bound by, and able to transcend, their geographic circumstance.

When I moved back to the US after 16 years abroad in 2022, I began working on the Adversarial Networks Series. I began living in Ohio, near the site of Hopewell Culture mounds and geometric enclosures from the Middle Woodland period (200 BCE – 500 CE) and in the middle of the present-day rust belt. My art explores how we perceive the transformation and erasure of these ancient mounds over time, and how preservation efforts can alternately mythologize and depict native sites with dignity.