Process behind form

My work explores the relationship between material, form and emotion. Through ceramics, sculpture and painting, I am interested in how objects can hold quiet presence and memory. The process is slow and intuitive, guided by nature, touch and attention. I grew up in a single-family house in the Polish countryside, in the unsettled years of post-communist Poland - the 1990s and early 2000s. My work moves across ceramics, mixed media, oil pastel and photography. I don't stay in one of them. I don't want to. My style is intuition, a love of nature, and the language I use to interpret everyone's reality - and how I see the world. I've always found it hard to understand other people, and harder still to say what I mean in words. Art is where that goes instead - not illustration, but interpretation: the closest way I have of putting into shape what I can't put into sentences.

The process comes first, always before the plan. I don't sketch before I draw, and I don't model before I carve - the hand moves, the mind follows after. That trust in instinct over control has a specific root: an early fascination with what sits just outside ordinary perception, with the idea - close to Annie Besant's Thought Forms - that a feeling or a thought can take on shape before it becomes conscious. I'm not illustrating that idea. I'm working the way it describes. I like the aesthetic of brutalism, too: heavy, but at the same time very honest - concrete shows how something was built. From outside, moving between mediums and moods like this can look like indecision. It isn't. It's the same instinct, worked back into material each time, in whatever form it happens to take. I don't have one style, and I'm not going to force one. What holds the work together isn't a look. It's the process underneath it - and my willingness to let that process decide the form, rather than the other way around.

Przemyslaw Golebiewski - ceramist - Berlin