Jagoda Natalia Zwiernik – Sculpture & Environmental Art – School of Fine Art

“The Silence of Matter” Salt, tears, sweat, cotton, porcelain / 1000 handmade flowers crystallized in salt in period of 7 months

The work reflects on the body as a site of memory, healing, and disruption, while salt functions as both a physical and symbolic agent of preservation, care, and impermanence. Through repetition, material agency, and subtle transformation, her practice invites viewers into spaces of quiet reflection on absence, vulnerability, and becoming.

***

Through the process of salt-based preservation,
something is held in stillness—an arrested moment, a
possibility,
a dialogue.
The flowers are no longer alive,
yet
they do not fully disappear.
Instead, they exist in an
in-between state,
where movement is slowed and
transformation is paused.

This process creates space
for reflection, inviting the viewer to consider fragility,
endurance, and the quiet threshold between presence
and absence.

My practice explores the relationship between the body, material transformation, and ecological fragility through sculptural installation. Using salt crystallisation, rust, accumulation, and unstable organic surfaces, I examine how matter can record time, healing, erosion, labour, and the vulnerability of the human condition. Salt is both the main material and an important metaphor within the work. It exists within the human body through tears, sweat, blood, and cellular processes, making it both deeply personal and universal. I am interested in salt as something that can heal and preserve, while also corroding, eroding, and slowly destroying. This contradiction becomes central to the work.

As a Polish artist, I am influenced by the cultural symbolism of salt within Polish traditions and history, where it is connected to protection, hospitality, ritual, endurance, and care. Salt carries memory — both personal and collective — while also carrying histories of labour, extraction, survival, and trade. The work reflects on the idea that humans exist within nature rather than separate from it. By laying my own rusted body cast into salt — a substance traditionally associated with healing — I create a chemical reaction between preservation and decay. The salt slowly crystallises across the rusted surfaces, while corrosion and erosion continue underneath. This process becomes a reflection on the human condition: vulnerability, healing, deterioration, resilience, and the impossibility of fully controlling transformation.

An important part of the installation is the presence of over one thousand handmade flowers, individually created and later crystallised with salt. The repetitive process of making, hanging, and transforming each flower foregrounds labour, care, and time. The work physically carries the traces of hand-making and endurance, connecting the act of artistic labour to the histories of labour embedded within salt itself. Through repetition and accumulation, the installation becomes both physically and emotionally immersive. (The suspended forms resemble flowers, bodily fragments, or musical notes hanging in space. Music strongly influences my practice, especially the compositions of Frédéric Chopin. The installation moves almost like a silent composition, where crystallised forms behave like suspended notes carrying grief, memory, tenderness, and resilience.I think about the installation almost like a quiet composition, where rhythm, repetition, fragility, and emotion move through the space.) In another hand the suspended forms and garment structures evoke bodily presence while also appearing mineral, fossilised, or decaying, blurring distinctions between body and landscape, preservation and collapse.

Crystallisation itself is an essential part of the meaning. The formations grow slowly and unpredictably over time, often beyond my control. For me, this process relates closely to healing, which also takes time and cannot be forced. The work embraces slowness, patience, and the act of allowing materials to exist and transform naturally.

Sustainability within my practice is not approached only through environmental awareness or material choice, but through questioning our emotional and ethical relationship with materials and the systems they belong to. The crystalline growths suggest cycles of preservation, contamination, extraction, decay, and regeneration, encouraging reflection on how ecological crisis is inseparable from social responsibility, care, labour, and human vulnerability. The work blurs the line between human and non-human, body and landscape, growth and decay. Sustainability in my practice is not only about environmentally conscious materials, but also about care, slowness, emotional connection, and our relationship with the natural world. Salt itself carries histories of labour, trade, survival, and extraction, reminding us that every material comes from wider social and ecological systems.

I want the work to create an emotional and physical experience for viewers. The fragile crystalline surfaces invite reflection on vulnerability, interdependence, and impermanence. By allowing materials to change and grow over time, the installation challenges ideas of permanence, control and suggests a more respectful relationship with nature — one where humans exist as part of it, not above it.