Pickled Mirror​

In fairy tales, mirrors have great power. They have beautiful, ornate frames, and extraordinary things happen on their surfaces. Magic mirrors reveal hidden desires, allow access to unknown worlds, but also have the power to summon the dead. When broken into pieces, they can distort not only the image reflected in them, but also reality itself. Sometimes it is enough just to look at them, other times it is better to touch their cold, crystal-clear surface and feel it soften under your fingers, and then move on toward the unknown. At other times, caution is advised. One careless move and the magic mirror can play tricks on you, and its shards can get under your eyelid, causing not only pain but also a change in ourselves. Sometimes the magic mirror can break as a result of spells cast on it. Then its surface will be enriched with a scratch stretching from one edge to the other, and its magical power will be divided and disappear forever.

Marta Jamróg's magic mirror is different. It is a simple wooden barrel that stood in her ancestors' house for many years. Her great-grandfather and aunts did not use it for folk magic, but simply to pickle cabbage. Shredded leaves, covered with a mixture of salt and water, optionally enriched with carrots, were kneaded to release the juice from the vegetables. Many years later, searching for her roots and the stories associated with them, Marta took the barrel and other items from that house to her studio. She looked at them for a long time, but she also looked at herself in them. She looked deep inside to see fragments of herself in them, but also of those who had used these things before her. Over time, she lined the inside of the barrel with a broken mirror, reminiscent of a kaleidoscope or human memory, broken and fragmentary. One that reflects fragments of what was. This is how her own magical mirror, the pickled mirror, was created. And so, an ordinary thing became a space for alchemical transformation.

In her latest exhibition, Kiszone lustro (Pickled Mirror), Marta Jamróg delves into the past. Interested in the book "Journey of Souls" by hypnotherapist Michael Newton, she embarks on a long journey that goes beyond her family history and the borders of her hometown of Jasło. In his book, Newton focused on topics related to the human soul. He described the process of the soul passing through death, encounters with spiritual guides, but also issues related to the conscious choice of the next incarnation, place, body, lessons, and tasks that the soul would like to undertake. Newton also sought answers to numerous questions. To what extent is our fate predetermined and to what extent can we shape it ourselves? Are we born with a ready-made script that we just have to play out? To what extent are we truly free beings? Are we just empty vessels, passive masses programmed according to a set script? Or are we something more, something that travels through time and space, borrowing different forms to discover the world? What if it is this impermanent, physical shell that is us, manifesting itself for a hundredth of a second in the Universe? Intrigued by these stories and questions, Jamróg began to paint slightly surreal, multicolored pictures filled with the artist's characteristic animal figures, plant shapes, but also human figures: anonymous saints, pop culture stars, people scurrying along the edge of the canvas.

In these paintings, Marta Jamróg has hidden her thoughts about man's place in the world, about his choices, but also about issues related to self-discovery, which refer us to a secret place where it all began. To the female womb, a place where not only people are created, but also worlds, ideas, and all possibilities and stories. In her paintings, the artist directs our attention to the moment when our lives are formed, treating it as a time when our first emotional matrices can be created and our individual predispositions are formed. It is a time when everything around us is buzzing, fermenting, and thus triggering various processes that begin to shape us before we enter into relationships with the outside world. The pickled mirror thus becomes a metaphor for all stages of our lives, which are like a mirror immersed in a process of constant fermentation. The pickled mirror reflects us not as we were created, but above all as we have become as a result of our actions, experiences, and decisions. The choices we make and their consequences are therefore not a punishment, but become elements of the process of maturing our image of ourselves.

In Pickled Mirror, you can observe without any plans what bubbles, thickens, rises, and falls, but also matures and changes. We can also return to a state without form, without body, to a moment where the emerging structures are still very fragile and can fall apart at any moment. They change and disintegrate quickly, but it is precisely in these budding shapes that the seeds of future stories lie.

Curator and author of the text: Marta Kudelska