Małgorzata Widomska, Alicja Bielawska - I interwine Your Fingers With Mine / Warsaw, NOV-DEC 2021
The exhibition title, I Intertwine Your Fingers with Mine, both subtle and surreal (borrowed from a poem by Małgorzata Widomska), signals an unusual meeting between two artists: Alicja Bielawska and Małgorzata Widomska. The context of intertwining and weaving, though rendered extraordinary in the exhibition title, is deeply connected to everyday life and intimacy. It appears in domestic spaces, where women help each other braid hair, or in textile workshops, where fabrics are created by their hands—away from grand exhibition halls. In both these spaces, domestic and workshop-like, a significant entanglement takes place. The finished becomes enmeshed with what is still in progress. The possible merges with the desired.
This entanglement should be understood as closeness rather than entrapment. Bielawska and Widomska, working in different techniques, engage in a dialogue of friendly proximity within a small space (incidentally, the Śmierć Człowieka gallery contains a large wooden wardrobe—an everyday household object). They introduce additional contexts or forms of closeness that arise when we open ourselves to experience.
Both artists are particularly attuned to detail, which may initially seem unexpected. Małgorzata Widomska’s oil paintings, The Great Mirror and The Door to My Father, lean toward abstraction. Their sizes—one canvas measuring 200 cm and the other 220 cm in height—might suggest that the artist seeks synthesis or a summation of personal experience. Yet, instead of grand narratives, her canvases are punctuated by tiny, seemingly insignificant details of her family home: the uneven groove on the left wing of the door leading to her father’s study, or the corroding edges of a hallway mirror. Such meticulous, almost obsessive attention to detail stems from Widomska’s artistic process. As she writes, a painting is a space for working through the meaning of foundational experiences. Observing her works, we are drawn into someone else's world—a world where reality is documented in all its facets. A world where everything has texture, a scent, a history, and often, a new incarnation within human memory.
Alicja Bielawska engages with details in a similar way. At first glance, one might assume she is primarily focused on composition. And indeed, her works display a deep sense of compositional balance. However, her poems—accompanying the exhibition—reveal something more. The artist, who describes these texts as records of her sensory engagement with fabric and ceramics, suggests that in works like The Screen and Vessels, another force is at play.
Dyeing and drying textiles, draping them over metal frames, admiring their softness or roughness, observing the deformations of clay vessels, learning traditional firing and glazing techniques—Bielawska’s process is not just a documentation of making, but a seamless shift of the viewer’s attention toward the materiality of their surroundings. She directs us to the tangible, the everyday, the objects that remain close to the body.
Bielawska’s world is one in motion—both literally and figuratively. It is a world where a round door handle protrudes from a shape, where colors can brush against a hand, where wool has a taste, and where geometric figures (which in Euclidean geometry remain two-dimensional) materialize in space as everyday objects: a table, a wardrobe, a bed. All of these objects move through time, carried by memory or desire.
I Intertwine Your Fingers with Mine is also, in many ways, an exhibition about absence. This absence exists on a narrative level—viewers must piece together their own interpretation of what the father’s study might have meant to him versus what it meant to a child. It is also present in the ephemeral nature of sensory experiences, a theme that intrigues Bielawska. In this context, another meaning of "weaving" comes into play: the idea of speaking in a fragmented way, providing incomplete information, filling in gaps with imagination. Women’s voices, in particular, have often been dismissed as "weaving stories"—an unstructured form of speech.
Feminist re-examinations of artistic techniques and the reclamation of applied arts—textiles, ceramics, and craftsmanship—extend beyond the formal aspects of this exhibition. They also permeate its deepest narrative layers, intertwining history, materiality, and the act of creation itself.
