Matylda (Mati) Wojtal- BA (Hons) Fine Art
Born in Poland (2004), Wojtal’s practice is guided by photographs found within family archives; each piece becoming a delicate tension between love and grief; the two themes intrinsically intertwined and coexisting alongside one another.
The Photograph holds an innate sense of vulnerability, one that can only come from seeing our relatives at an age that mirrors our very own. Time becomes piercingly tangible; as though The Photograph were its purest representation. Punctum. We are then, confronted not only with their fragile mortality, but with our own; experiencing humanity in its entirety all in one moment: life and death, ‘desire and mourning’.
Her work functions as an ode to that grief, its temporality embedded within the materials themselves. Cracked, chipping plaster and unset charcoal mirror the persistent nature of time and the inevitability of loss. The works gradually fracture and fade over time, allowing grief to exist without narrative resolution.
Votive (2026) carries this grief into the body: a physically heavy ode to the immigrant experience and its quiet, persistent displacement, while simultaneously turning inwards towards a self held between fear and a foreign longing for acceptance.
Inspired by Polish winged Hussar soldiers, the chain-mail armour exists somewhere between protection and vulnerability. Glaringly out of place within a contemporary setting, it asks to be witnessed. The piece becomes a pseudo performance, worn by the artist herself, then discarded within the Holden gallery as its final resting place; funeral soldiers returning nowhere, adorned in pretend medals.
