Magpie feather, sea glass, key—these are a few selected categories of objects from my private collection of found items that together form the title of my MA project, realised between 2023 and 2026 at the Intermedia Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków under the supervision of Dr Krzysztof Maniak.

This exhibition constitutes a summary of my artistic practice developed around the motif of gathering. When I first began engaging with this theme—still during my diploma project at the Fine Arts Secondary School in Tarnów (2020)—I was not yet aware of the significance that gathering would come to hold in my art and in my life. At that time, moreover, the subject of gathering was rather marginal in public debate. This has since changed. Over time I realised how important this theme is to me; the status of gathering itself as a discourse has also shifted. An important event promoting gathering culture in Poland was certainly the publication, in 2024 by the Kraków-based publishing house Karakter, of the book Patrz pod nogi. O zbieraniu rzeczy by Kora Tea Kowalska. Another was last year’s group exhibition Hoarding (2025), held at Galeria Pracownia Wschodnia in Warsaw, in which I had the honour of presenting several of my works.

I believe that this theme will continue to develop, and I am convinced that I will actively participate in this process. Gathering still conceals many aspects from us which, in my view, continue to hold considerable culture-forming potential. On a more personal level, gathering is an activity that largely defines who I am. I am a gatherer. When I now reach into the left pocket of my jacket—which, from repeatedly holding sharp objects, has split into two compartments—I find there: a fragment of a broken polka-dotted vessel from beneath a bridge, half a shell of a leguminous plant taken from a fence, a smooth stone from a car park, a plastic object with a hole for my collection of objects with holes, soil, sand, fine fibres…