About me

I loved to paint from the moment I was able to hold a crayon. Early on, I specialised in "art interventions" – I would draw princesses with oversized heads in my older sister’s notebooks when she wasn’t looking and, completely unauthorised, cover my cousin’s bedroom wall in odd creatures. My first art commission happened at the nursery when I was about 5 years old. When my parents came to pick me up, I was sitting behind a desk, with a long queue of children in front of me, waiting for me to draw them a bunny – a task I approached with the efficiency, patience and dedication of a best-selling author on a book signing tour. I drew and painted a lot when I was a child and a teenager, but the moment I decided to actively pursue art was around the age of 17. I signed up to weekend art classes at Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, a city 6 hours away on the train, and for a year I’d spend every other weekend drawing and painting nudes and various compositions of draperies and kettles from early morning to late evening. My formal art education began with a foundation course at Camberwell College of Arts, followed by a BA in Theatre: Design for Performance at Central Saint Martins. I had been writing and performing in amateur theatre productions throughout my teenage years, so the whimsical world of model boxes and visual storytelling felt like home. The course, led by Michael Spencer, was like no other. We were not trained to be designers. We were taught to think independently, encouraged to develop our identity and allowed to experiment and fail with no judgement. And we learned to collaborate – to be kind, helpful and constructive with our criticism. In the ego-obsessed snobbish art world, we were developing into artists sensitive to the wide world, not enclosed in our little one. After my Bachelor's Degree, I went to Warsaw to do my Master's Degree at Academy of Fine Arts at its most progressive department of Media Art and Stage Design led by Paweł Dobrzycki, who also supervised my MA thesis. Once again, I was lucky to be taught a professor of great vision and broad horizons, and I was granted individual training, which complemented my London education. The excellent training I received at both Central Saint Martins and Academy of Fine Arts fired my imagination and yearning for independent expression in multiple forms. Thanks to my experiences, I was able to develop my skills and my vision with the assertiveness and courage that is often missing in the fine art world – a world riddled with conventions, trends and unhealthy hierarchies. For a few years following graduation, I worked across several disciplines, gradually identifying and forming my area and language of expression, before making painting my primary focus. I wrote two children’s books, developed site-specific art events, graphic design for short films, and stage design for theatre and operatic productions, including “The Burial at Thebes” opera at Shakespeare’s Globe in London and “The Little Prince” musical at the Musical Theatre ROMA in Warsaw. I worked with some wonderful artists and institutions, including Derek Walcott, Secret Cinema, Rich Mix, Daniel Blau, The Ceramic House, and had my works shown at various galleries and venues, including the William Morris Gallery in London. In 2018, after my artistic and geographical adventures, which included a year in Portugal, I relocated to Poland and in 2019 I began my painting journey. It wasn't long before the coronavirus pandemic started sweeping the globe and I spent a couple of years working in isolation, in a country tormented by pandemic and political crisis. Then three years later, on New Year's Eve, I moved to the Netherlands with the intention of broadening my painting language. Working across fields as well as cultural and geographical borders not only has broadened my horizons but has shaped the way I express myself on canvas. Like a theatrical performance, I want my paintings to move, provoke and engage the viewer. I want to inspire people to embrace our messy human selves, and celebrate the human nature with all its beauty and its ugliness.