Makers / Wiola Ujazdowska, Julia Woronowicz

The exhibition Makers brings together two projects: Painters. A Herstory of Włocławek Faience 1945–1991 by Wiola Ujazdowska and The Wool-Headed. Mazonian Culture in Early Modern Poland by Julia Woronowicz. Both reflect on the tradition of women’s creative labour, including painting, weaving, and craftwork, restoring the memory of communities of women who, through their everyday practices, co-created the material and symbolic culture of Poland.

Wiola Ujazdowska’s research-based project Painters. A Herstory of Włocławek Faience 1945–1991 combines artistic practice, archival research, and theoretical reflection to activate the memory of women artists employed in the faience factories of Włocławek during Poland’s socialist period. The exhibition presents works from the Women of Faience series, which aims to restore the visibility of painters, craftswomen, and decorators, while examining how their activities were embedded within broader social and cultural contexts. The project explores art both as a form of labour and as a means of women’s professional empowerment within the system of state socialism, while also considering it a strategy of emancipation and community-building. The exhibition includes ceramic works created by Ujazdowska using the faience painting technique she learned directly from former Włocławek faience painters. The artist spent several months working in a small workshop, where she learned the craft from women who had previously been employed at the factory. Drawing on archival photographs from the socialist era depicting the factory’s painting studio, she created a series of commemorative plates dedicated to anonymous painters, as well as vases decorated with group portraits of faience artists. In the Weedvases series, she painted ruderal plants growing among the ruins of the past factory, referencing the tradition of floral ornamentation. 

In The Wool-Headed. Mazonian Culture in Early Modern Poland, Julia Woronowicz explores themes related to the weaving traditions and women’s craft practices. Her works balance between real heritage and artistic ethnofiction with a feminist overtone. The paintings and tapestries are presented as traces of Mazonian culture that existed between the 6th and 17th centuries. Entering Woronowicz’s imaginary world, we assume the role of researchers who dig into the successive layers of the material legacy of this living fiction. Following this logic, the displayed objects are understood as preserved fragments of murals, bearing traces of conservation interventions and later overpainting. Within the context of women’s handicraft traditions, Woronowicz refers to weaving cooperatives, which once provided spaces for women’s independence and solidarity. Through her tapestries and a film documenting the legacy of the weavers from the Pilsko-Żywiec cooperative, the artist restores forgotten networks of relationships, showing how craft can function as a form of memory and resistance to the exclusion of women from dominant narratives.

The practices of Ujazdowska and Woronowicz invite us to look at art as a communal practice–one that connects individual experiences with collective memory and the past with the present. The act of making evoked in the exhibition’s title extends beyond the production of material objects; it also refers to the making of communities, relationships, legacies, and meanings.

Feminist artistic research provides a crucial context for both artists. It functions not only as a method of analysis, but also as a means of preserving and restoring the twentieth-century heritage connected to women’s labour. Their goal is to reclaim the history of overlooked artistic and craft practices that shaped everyday life and the aesthetics of the previous century. In this sense, art becomes a tool for revising and reshaping cultural narratives that for centuries marginalised women’s creative experiences. As such, the exhibition Makers can be positioned within a broader field of research that, through artistic gestures and memory reconstructions, restores this heritage as a living and still relevant part of culture.