Exhibition
Cultural Protagonist
KATE PIEKUTOWSKI
Cultural Protagonist is a body of work that has developed from my latest art residency in Cradle Mountain earlier this year. The imagery responds to a personal relationship between identity and place. Using printmaking as the dominant technique in this exhibition, the prints incorporate native, folk and diasporic themes relating back to the Polish homeland as well as an intimate journey through the main character. Stuck between two vastly different cultures, the work aims to marry the two, exploring Australian flora and the infamous elegance of European architecture that we all romanticise about. The protagonist, the femme fatale, who is lurks within these pieces loosely represent self-portraits of emotional, nostalgic and melancholic states of being. It was Frida Kahlo who once said, ‘I want to be inside your darkest everything’. These works aim to represent the darkness and isolation which can occur from these various emotional states and how my isolation from my heritage and homeland has influenced the entirety of my identity.