When an artist’s studio itself becomes a curiosity, a kind of inexplicable longing, the creative process begins to take its own course. The room, the window, the table transform into a space of collecting — a space that becomes, in itself, an inherent creative challenge. A thing waiting to be discovered.

The titular phrase Pockets Full of Stones serves as a metaphor for the act of collecting — a process that, repeated over and over, transforms into a journey in search of new places, people, and the stories connected to them. In Magdalena Tryba’s practice, the emphasis, however, is not on the found objects themselves, but on the act of collecting and the relentless pursuit of form that underpins it. After all, colourful nurdles, the tiny skeleton of a plastic fish drifting in the sea, or microscopic metal shavings that elude a magnet suspended on a string mean little on their own.

Perhaps recalling the words of Zhang Chao, a somewhat forgotten 17th-century writer from western China, can shed light on this process: "Flowers must have butterflies, mountains their streams, rocks their moss, oceans their seaweed, ancient trees their vines and creepers, and humans — their obsessions." Can this declaration of attentiveness open a doorway into the microhistories of people and objects that the artist has revealed?

Though the objects constantly change their forms, disappear, and are replaced by new ones, the old saying reminds us to believe that “nothing in nature is lost.” In the case of Pockets Full of Stones, what we are truly witnessing is the ongoing migration of objects. Migration, which in this exhibition takes the form of an artistic installation in process, attempting to address the inherent challenges posed by the space of Shefter Gallery.