Joanna Piotrowska

Opening: Thursday, 4 September 2025, 6-9pm

The artist is present.

“Father had a dream about you last night. You were back and then you were gone.” – News from Home,Chantal Akerman, 1977.

I need to buy milk. More bread. Take some meat out of the freezer and wash the whites. There is a bloodstain on the back of a shirt: the ghost of a mosquito bite. My husband put a wash on this morning – the tea towels, the kitchen cloths, the bathmat, which had accumulated a web of hairs, crushed into the weave, and a muddy sole print, dark against the white cloth, fixing the footstep, like a crime scene. He did this task because yesterday evening we argued about time and labour: it was not so much an argument as land grabbing, like most household quarrels. 

The language of the domestic is the language of repetition. When will you be home tonight? Balance due now, again. Boil for six minutes. Rinse and repeat. Expires 08/2025. The lists: eggs, berries, spaghetti, grapes, cream. You forgot the broccoli. No. 74. No. 75. No. 76, A, B and C. The initials on a napkin, like the ones that make up the border of this new work by Joanna Piotrowska, an extension of her explorations into collage. A crop, a fragment of an image of a mother and daughter, made large on cloth, and surrounded by more textiles, quilted together: a collage of memories and habits and motions repeated, a letter from home. 

Tablecloths and linens: only for best, or for every day, or for you to keep because it was your grandmother’s and I had it before you. The fabrics were sourced from charity shops, or online – some are stained. The writer Annie Ernaux is fascinated by stains – dirt, blood, semen, wine, food – calling them evidence. They are, she says, visible traces that prove our existence. They are simultaneously packed with and devoid of narrative: there is no beginning or end to the stories, no guiding information, no way out.

The domestic rejects linear narratives. Rejects firm conclusions. At home, time is not a mountain to climb, but a pool to swim in. Round and round. Serious thought supposedly opposes such maddening replication, such creeping disorder. It cleaves itself, afraid, from the spinning circles of home life and looks back and calls them facile. Housework is reduced, ignored as a subject for analysis, study, or even lively discussion. But Piotrowska’s work questions such hierarchies. It pursues a link between the repetition found within the domestic sphere, and creativity itself: an artist gives their all each day, only to rise the next and start again, explore the same themes, rehash the same arguments, try, try, and try again. It is never enough. To make art is a violent, frustrating process, just as the home is a site of inequalities and brutalities and exhaustions, the root of all battles, all great divisions. 

A theme in Piotrowska’s work is the performance of repetitive motions: the self-defence techniques, the cages, the same gestures captured repeatedly, the same people, even the same picture, shown again and again. Such cycles connect her not just to the home – a site of great inspiration to her – but to the body, with its rhythms and circuits, and to psychoanalysis with its focus on repeating dreams, behaviours, patterns. Frames are also a recurring emblem of hers. They are a home of sorts, a structure, like the shelters she has photographed in the past, made from domestic objects like bedsheets, cushions and furniture. They are a home within a home. Just as this work is an image within an image, cloth within cloth. Within its border, it is held, swaddled, contained, trapped, completed.

Lou Stoppard