An interview with Marita Benke-Gajda, a visual artist and participant in the 1993 National Bolesławiec Ceramic Sculpture Open-Air Workshop.
What intention did you come to this year’s open-air workshop with?
I came with entirely different plans. I thought I would continue working on the Jewish theme, to which I devoted last year’s open-air workshop. However, I returned to a time from three years ago. I took up again matters that are deeply rooted in me. As you know, three years ago I experienced the greatest tragedy of my life in Bolesławiec—the death of my husband. I am working on a series that I provisionally called “Scene.” A jester, harlequin or Pierrot appears in it. It is a story about life. Before my husband’s death, I made a series of works entitled “Romantic Woman.” I was supposed to show it at an exhibition in Poznań. I was preparing for it. The final ceramic painting in the series was to be “Woman on Stage.” Perhaps I had a prophetic thought then: on the stage of life, a woman is left alone. I was frightened by my own thought and tried to change the arrangement…but apparently God’s decrees cannot be reversed, because on the stage of life I was left alone...
Returning to today’s series: this imagined Pierrot is an abstract, theatrical figure; it is an overlay of the figure of the man of my life—my husband. The Harlequin appears in an abstract space... It is a story about love and despair... A story about everyday life that touches us. These symbols are also extremely limited, highly conventional. They are signs, fragments of images that existed in the past and that, through my imagination, overlap with the present day.
Your sculpture is very intimate... within arm’s reach, close by. Could this be a reflection of the structure of your psyche?
Indeed, my works are small. I make very intimate sculpture, on the scale of a single person. That is what my psyche is like... I have never made large things... everything is intimate and subdued.
Does Bolesławiec give you the only opportunity to realize your ideas?
Of course. You know, I fell in love with Bolesławiec. Once I threw a coin into your pond, and I have been coming here every summer ever since.
You have an advantage over passing time: you can express what you feel in your sculpture and stop time.
That is indeed true. I often thought that if, after my husband’s death, I had not come to Bolesławiec, where for six days of the open-air workshop, hardly leaving the ceramic plant, I was able to create the exhibition (“Epitaph for Romek”), I would never have lived through that suffering, that pain. Here I was able to scream, cry, and convey all that inner rupture in sculpture.
It also allowed me to gain some perspective and find my mission. It comes down to this reflection: I should tell another person that life is worth living, that everything happening around us is beautiful, that another person is good, and that we must open up that goodness within them. I think God gave me this experience so that I could learn to respond in precisely this way. And artistic work is a way of expressing my truth about life.