Grand Prix at International Contest of Digital Photocreation CYBERFOTO, Poland, 2020

The first part of the work’s name,
which comes from alchemy, means ‘blackening’ and refers to
decomposition aiming to separate what is permanent from the
impermanent, truth from illusion, so that what remains is the essence
itself. The concept has been taken up by depth psychology that so
defines the ‘dark night of the soul’ - as a painful but necessary
confrontation with one’s own shadow (content repressed from
consciousness) in order to gain deeper self-awareness. Figuratively,
Nigredo always becomes for me a desert, an archetypal place of
transformation, where everything is laid bare to the bone, where
nothing can hide.

‘New Pompeii‘, on the other hand,
simply imposed itself on me - when I heard it in my head, I knew it
was the right name for this particular work created shortly after my
visit to Pompeii. I had fulfilled an old dream of mine visiting the
Villa of the Mysteries (where the Dionysian mysteries of the ‘second
half of life’ took place, i.e. initiations into deeper meanings
when the woman had already fulfilled most of the roles expected of
her in life). The title refers more to what I feel when communing
with this image than to the actual thematic connections with Pompeii:
 beyond the commonality of destruction and mystery.

The work has emerged from the themes
that have always fascinated me and in which I have been ‘digging
around’ for as long as I can remember: mysteries (occultism - as
hidden knowledge), initiation, intuition, transformation, animism
(and, by extension, shamanism), so-called ‘pagan’ gods and
spirits (especially Greek, Celtic, Nordic and West African ones,
wildness, freedom, multiplicity in unity (nods to S.I. Witkiewicz),
and unity in multiplicity. Figures with horns have always symbolized
for me an existence that combines its animal, instinctive (divine)
nature with the human one. A private symbol of ‘conscious
wildness’, from which springs primal strength, vitality – ‘zoë’.

I start my work with a figure or
element that has an intuitive energy charge and ‘complete’ the
image by looking at what emerges, whether its components ‘work’
together. I eliminate the planning and intellectual conceptualisation
as much as possible - I look for images that emerge from deeper
levels, images with inherent energy. The whole process is as
intuitive as possible - before I knew what it was called, I was using
Jung’s technique of active imagination.