Kasia Wozniak: stillpoint

Incubator is pleased to present Stillpoint, a solo exhibition of new photographic works by Kasia Wozniak.

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is"

– Burnt Norton, T.S.Eliot, 1936

So few people take photographs the way Kasia Wozniak does that the Polish artist had to learn her technique from books in the British Library nearly 15 years ago. Her only mentor, an older man called Sean McKenna, has since passed away. Now a custodian of a bygone craft, Wozniak works with a 19th-century Gandolfi camera and wet plate collodion process with each frame requiring a fragile orchestration of chemical control, light conditions and precise timing. Resulting in deep, hazy black and white scenes that could have been taken 150 years ago or yesterday, her subjects inhabit a suspended place - one she uses to explore memory, time, and the strange materiality of our shifting bodies.

While most photographers are free to shoot frame after frame, the cumbersome hooded ritual of Wozniak’s process means she might only have means to capture a particular scene once. Now an artist in her 40s - a sought-after fashion image-maker and Sarabande Foundation alumnus - years of this slow, meticulous practice has gifted her with an attunement to the preciousness of a given moment. Borrowing its title from T.S.Eliot’s searching poem Burnt Norton, her Incubator show Stillpoint presents a view from this sensitive vantage point, centring around three subjects of both humdrum mundanity and cross-cultural symbolic fascination: eggs, stones, and the self.

Pocketed and brought back to London, rocks collected over the years from the Margate coast are shot with the same reverence Wozniak has lensed models for fashion tomes, translating their rough, weighty forms onto oxidised copper plates. The artist contemplates them in the context of her personal life - she moved to London from Poland after school, fell in love with someone and never moved back - offering them up as meditations on what it means to find one’s place on unfamiliar terrain. Heavy and immutable, they sit grounded in the downstairs of the gallery space.

Upstairs, Wozniak shifts into lighter states, pairing ethereal orb-like eggs with urgently composed self-portraits. The artist’s fascination with eggs began during her time at the Sarabande Foundation, when she photographed one balanced on a chair once belonging to Alexander McQueen while waiting for a sitter. Since then, she has returned to the form again and again, captivated by its promise of endless beginning. Balanced with these still lifes, self-portraits taken in yoga poses layer moments of stillness with flashes of animalistic, warrior-like energy. Together, they plumb the complexities of living in a transforming female body - a form that, like the egg, carries depths too often overlooked.

Daring us to tune into the enlightening potential in the everyday, the works in Stillpoint came together while Wozniak was reading Ursula Le Guin’s radical 1976 essay Space Crone, which frames the three distinct stages of a woman’s life as a gift not to be not to be squandered. As Le Guin writes: “It seems a pity to have a built-in rite of passage and to dodge it, evade it and pretend nothing has changed. That is to dodge and evade one’s womanhood. Men, once initiated, never get the second chance. They never change again. That’s their loss, not ours.”