Hesi Glowacki

'“Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.”' ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

My work pivots around memory, trauma, personal histories, and the effect on the body.

I am often inspired by the stories that I have heard, personal experience, fashion photography from the '90, literature and magic realism. I paint an imaginary world that doesn't exist, and also documenting a world I place myself in. Realistic and dreamlike, both figurative and abstract, an experiment in visualising and giving form to memory, trauma, and otherness, full of potential for transfiguration, resurrection, and rebirth. 

Drawing from the concept of ritual and ceremony and the notion of renewal and transformation, I want to alter the idea of the body as a victim of trauma and frame it instead as a site of power and beauty, primarily through body alteration, clothing, and decoration.

I am interested in the performative quality of materials and how, once used, transform narration and acquire new meanings, rising almost to the status of spiritual abstraction.

Through experimentation with materials, I refer to the alchemical transformation of base metal into gold and metaphorically manifest the internal process whose real goal is self-transformation. Change and renewal have an ambiguous and surviving purpose, which helps with identity-formation, world-making and recreation.

The elements of installation, artificial flowers, objects, and writing play a role in the enriching reflection on transmutation, concealment and disclosure, memorial, and celebration.