About

Born in Żytkiejmy, Poland. Raised in Southeast Ohio. Currently living in Portland, Oregon. 

I am an immigrant. A multidisciplinary artist. A visual arts educator. A writer. A student of wisdom traditions. An aspiring anti-racist and ally.

Process 

My creative practice is rooted in noticing. Where all things begin.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
— Mary Oliver

From a young age I have felt very aware of the passing of time and the inevitable fact of change. Naturally, I gravitated towards the camera (and the arts at large) as a way to remember the moments I hoped to keep close.

As a photographer, I seek to capture honest moments in my subjects and the fleeting beauty of the everyday. Walking with a camera in tow grants me the rare permission to slow down and carefully study life. A desire to be in relationship with the living world and a sense of awe guide my process of creating images. On an ultimate level, each photograph I make is a bow to impermanence, an acknowledgement that this moment and its very conditions will never be again, and a gift of gratitude for my getting to live it.

Through the medium of clay, I am able to give form to ideas, visions, and symbols that court my imagination (which is shaped by my particular life and cultural inheritance). I delight in making vessels with a presence as much as I enjoy engaging in experimentation with no expectation of outcome. I notice that my inner child comes alive and takes charge when I hold clay in my hands: at once, I am all the ages I’ve ever been. I learn something about myself through every idea my hands make tangible.

“I believed that I wanted to be a poet. But deep down, I just wanted to be a poem.”
— Jaime Gil De Biedma

As an artist, I am growing to value the process of creation and the finished product equally. I have become increasingly curious about the ways in which artistic skills and creative experiences inform and ultimately change how we perceive our whole lives. As we embark in making works of art, I am curious about the subtle and profound ways the artmaking works us.

If we accept the invitation, I believe the tools creativity has to offer us have the potential to awaken us: from the myths of “success” and “happiness” sold to us by our commercial and profit-driven culture, to unseen realms, to the wilderness of imagination, to the quiet immensity of our own presence (John O Donohue), to the miracle of being at all.

“Isn’t it the very last thing we feel grateful for – having happened? You needn’t have happened. But you did happen.”
— Douglas Harding