Krzysztof Zajaczkowski - Studio Practice
Before starting the Advanced Diploma I was trying to get a comprehensive experience of the many media in art. I had been at art college 35 years ago after leaving school and had chosen a very pragmatic route into 3D industrial design so that I could find work afterwards. Looking back, the more creative fine art aspect was quite a loss for me. So when I arrived in New Zealand I jumped at the chance to explore creativity at The Learning Connexion. I re-learnt to draw well and became a moderately good painter, but continually felt the need to leave traditional drawing and painting and explore more elusive and ambiguous ways of expressing one’s thoughts, feelings and ideas.
Beginning the Advanced Diploma was a real paradigm shift which at first took a massive amount of trust, courage and patience. The ideas presented were profoundly deep and often quite academic and intellectual. The proof lay in the doing and I was soon completely immersed in working with processes and materials which I thought I’d chosen quite arbitrarily but, which soon acquired enormous significance and meaning in quite an uncanny manner.
The work was still three dimensional; working mainly with European Ash and with fire - scorching, sanding and basically transforming the wood through fire. I later remembered that my father’s family had been foresters in Poland for at least four generations, that I had taught woodwork for many years and that my son is a carpenter! I even used antique wooden printing blocks, which I’d found in a skip 30 years ago, to emboss words relating to fire onto white cotton paper. The process took on its own life and its own journey.
My work has transformed and changed rapidly and at a pace quite uncontrolled by myself. All my finished pieces hold a lot of poignant motifs for me as a person but they speak in completely other ways to other viewers.
The Advanced Diploma has assigned study material for students which, although challenging, can be thought provoking and extremely exciting. Many suggested artists were, for me, incredibly inspiring they affirmed the course and direction which I was taking. This was very synchronous and ultimately very encouraging! Of course, one artist leads on to another when researching other work on the internet and this becomes a very rich and fertile ground for further inspiration.
Of the many resources provided on the Advanced Diploma programme, and it was good to dip into all of them on a regular basis, I found the human connection the most potent and fruitful. Much of the ‘study’ is done online so a meeting with a tutor always proved refreshing and invariably provided me with more food for thought and a ‘next step’ forward.
Personally, I felt that my mentor’s role was to re-focus me back into a direction which my work was taking, but which was not always obvious to me - it’s easy to lose sight of the wood for the trees and to clarify the parameters needed in such a potentially free and open ‘playing field’.
As for discovering new techniques and methods, the beauty of the programme is in its potential for self-innovation through exploration. The techniques are often ‘ invented’ by the student through trial and error. The methods become highly personal to the student as they are not necessarily taught, but discovered.
My body of work has been largely of an ephemeral nature; mandalas blown by the wind, towers of nails collapsed by the slightest touch, lines of fire running the length of a beach and roses created by the carbonised unfolding of a cardboard tube set alight. Another was comprised of 600 matches set upright into a triptych on white board and set alight.
All my work has been photographed and filmed and may one day be reproduced in a gallery setting. But ultimately, all these works are an expression of inner struggles and dynamics of the psyche which in themselves are fleeting, intangible and transient and live without the need for acknowledgement, critique or even viewing! The Advanced Diploma programme is the facilitator of such wonderful personal alchemy!
- See more at: http://www.tlc.ac.nz/current-students/programme-requirements/programme-requirements-advanced/studio-practice/#sthash.D71jZY4N.dpuf