Marcin Gawin is an interdisciplinary artist from Poland, based in Bristol, whose work encompasses image construction, installation, and live art. His fascination with the human body and its potential for transformation is evident in his practice, which explores the body’s function in mundane practicality, as well as in speculative and occult realities.
In 2019, Marcin completed Marina Abramovic’s Cleaning the House training in durational performance, further developing his expertise in this area. He also honed his skills in The Sunday Skool for Misfits, Experimenters, and Dissenters, where he studied under Martin O’Brien, Shabnam Shabazi, and Joseph Morgan Schofield in 2021.
Currently, Marcin is pursuing an MA in Virtual and Extended Realities at the University of the West of England, where he is researching the concept of embodied cognition in virtual environments and utilising immersion as an artistic strategy.
Marcin’s work has been presented at various locations, including the Palace International Film Festival in Bristol, Modern Art Oxford, Terytoria Festiwal in Poland, and Oxford Brookes University. His solo and participatory work is sure to leave a lasting impression.
You currently collaborate with VSSL Studio presenting “HERMAPHROGENESIS” a solo exhibition in London. What kind of new artworks are you showing there?
I will show a series of 5 new lightboxes, each of them featuring a digital collage with a central figure inspired by different aspects of a human brain stem which I anthropomorphised. The entity starts as a marker drawing and the geometrical figures at the back I took from my dream where I saw huge stacks of paper from above. The backgrounds are a combination of heavily edited photographs of silicone organs and AI blends of depth maps with computer vision generated topographies and diagrams.
“Face to the Seventh” – an installation of four lightboxes that have already been presented in the VSSL group show, depict compositions made out of the silicone replicas of human organs, reorganised in a style of traditional still-life arrangements. I manipulate the organs against the mirror to give them the bilateral symmetry that’s widely observed in biology, creating a set of new kinds of organisms.
And finally the “Codex” that’s essentially a gross anatomy atlas which was an influence to the other artworks. Here I found the inspiration for “The large head was split into five each” series, observing how different parts of our body resemble figures and other recognisable forms. I started using blackout poetry in the introduction which revealed a cryptic manifesto of five entities speaking about creation of the new anatomy, knowledge acquisition, and the transformative nature of understanding the body.
“HERMAPHROGENESIS sanctifies pareidolia–the process of perceiving meaningful images in ambiguous visual patterns–and elevates it to a metaphor for queerness”. This is an interesting statement from the press release; could you please elaborate on this regarding your exhibition?
The sentence comes from a text that [M] Dudeck – my friend and artist – wrote to accompany the exhibition. Here the parallel between the pareidolia and queerness lies in how they both exemplify a field of potentiality. In the case of pareidolia, a coat hanger can be just a coat hanger but it has a potential to be seen as a fighting octopus. Or a burnt mark on a toast, suddenly becoming an image of Virgin Mary. This process shows our capacity to make up alternative meanings of what can be seen as fixed structures. Similarly with Queerness, to me its power lies in the potential it holds and how it invites us to imagine and enact alternative ways of being and relating. In my work, I got interested in how the human brain stem, visible from different angles, looks very humanoid. So in the series of five lightboxes “The large head was split into five each”, this one organ, when depicted from different sides (left, right, back, front etc.) becomes five distinct entities. Human body itself is very rich in pareidolia and that phenomenon is often used in medical teaching to help students learn anatomy. My favourite is the penile cross section that looks like an upset alien.
Could you share with us some insights from an artwork of yours, something like a particular story or meaning behind an artwork from your exhibition?
The whole exhibition – Hermaphrogenesis – is about the creation of a hermaphrodite – an end product of alchemical great work, a unity symbolised as a being capable of producing both male and female qualities. In this project I use human anatomy and its reorganisation as an exercise in thinking, challenging what we perceive to be a fixed structure in our world. It’s very evident in the case of human biology for example, where sexual organs can be seen as dominant in how they structure many contemporary societies. By removing gonads from the work altogether, I try to foreground parts that are shared among all the human species and speculate on the process of becoming through rearrangement.
Is there any particular theme that utterly triggers you to engage your art with?
I take a lot of inspiration just from the human body as it is our main interface with the world: how it functions mechanically; how it looks, both outside and inside; how it is mapped in space; how bodies relate to one another, organise etc. – it is a never ending source of inspiration. I used to work with live art and this tradition is certainly a foundation for my practice, especially endurance work where the body is the raw medium of the artwork. Often the springboard for my ideas are various philosophies or mythologies, recently by virtue of doing my MA in Virtual and Expanded Realities, I got into phenomenology which is a branch of philosophy that deals with embodied experience of our life. As a kid I spent a lot of time in churches and that was my first exposure to art at all so sacred art is always finding its way into my practice. I also used to work with stained glass and I really love the process of traditional craftsmanship, but recently I have been venturing towards new media and thinking about immersion and participation as an artistic strategy.
What do you hope audiences will take from your work? Do you have any sort of expectations while visiting your show?
I hope that it will inspire conversations among people and provide an interesting sensory experience.
Do specific artworks have been created by random experiments in your studio or do you always come up with a particular concept or narrative in the very beginning?
It’s often a bit of back and forth with that for me. This exhibition encompasses a few years of thinking about the human body and collecting different drawings and materials. Some of the artworks were a particular idea that I wanted to execute, especially more technical aspects such as displaying artworks in lightboxes to reference stained glass windows. The silicone organ arrangements were something that happened by chance, where I accidentally scattered them next to the mirror and noticed the peculiar shapes this produces. I was working simultaneously on all of the artworks and they all fed into each other. The text from the book ended up framing everything together and is the beginning of a bigger mythology I want to work on.
More info about FACET programme: https://vssl-studio.org/FACET
VSSL Studio invite you to attend a conversation between Dr Erinma Ochu and artist Marcin Gawin as part of FACET’s final exhibition HERMAPHROGENESIS by Marcin Gawin.
VSSL studio Enclave, 50 Resolution Way Deptford, London, UK SE8 4AL
Contact: info@vssl-studio.org