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Coming Soon: Tethered Narratives by Kamila Waleszkiewicz & Mandana Eizadi | 2–20 Dec 2026 | Rockingham Arts Centre
Emerging from Absence: A Phenomenological, Practice-Led Inquiry into Lived Experience Through Multidisciplinary Art Making
This year-long, practice-led research project explored phenomenology, affect and somatic experience. Working with family photographs, domestic objects, light, shadow, lace and a handmade wooden chair, I investigated how memories can be encountered not only through images, but also through the body
Research and Creative Process
Research and Creative Process
The research considers memory as a lived and embodied experience, something sensed through touch, movement, atmosphere, spatial relationships and emotional response. Family archives became material for revisiting fragments of the past, while familiar domestic objects were transformed into elements of an evolving installation.
Through an iterative process of making, experimentation and reflection, I explored how different materials and artistic processes could translate personal memories into physical and spatial experiences. Burning, engraving, printmaking, layering, illumination and projection became ways of working with traces of family history, absence and presence.
The handmade wooden chair became a central element of the research: an object carrying associations of domestic life, family relationships and generational memory. Alongside it, prints, handmade dolls, moving images, fabric and light developed into interconnected forms of expression.
The project explored how relationships between objects, materials, images and space could create an experience of remembrance.
Prints, Prayer, Light and Shadow
Prints, Prayer, Light and Shadow
Prayers for Love is an ongoing series of symbolic, digitally manipulated self-portraits depicting me seated on The Chair That Remembers. Accompanied by my grandmother's prayer book, red thread, Motanka dolls and sheer lace, the images bring together personal memory, prayer and rituals of care and protection. Through distortion and fragmentation, the body emerges as an uncanny presence, shaped by memory and the desire to reconnect with what has been lost.
The imagery draws on the intimate world of my childhood, particularly the atmosphere of my grandmother's home and the sacred spaces of the church. Light and shadow became essential elements in translating these remembered environments into the installation. Through illumination, projection and translucent materials, I explored how images and silhouettes could move beyond representation, creating a sense of presence within absence.
Light, darkness and shadow worked together to establish an intimate, contemplative atmosphere, where fragments of personal history, childhood memories and family relationships could coexist in a shared space.
The photographs here document experiments and stages in the development of the installation. They offer glimpses into the research process. They do not represent the completed exhibition.
From Research to Exhibition
From Research to Exhibition
The research culminated in a multidisciplinary installation presented at the 2026 Honours Graduate Show at the University of Western Australia.
The exhibition brought together different elements developed throughout the research process, creating a space in which personal archives, material transformations and embodied experiences could be encountered together.
Explore the completed exhibition at the Honours Graduation Show, on 28 October 2026.
28 October 2026 | 6–8 pm - Cullity Gallery, The University of Western Australia
Bachelor of Arts (Honours) practice-led research project
Emerging from Absence: A Phenomenological, Practice-Led Inquiry into Lived Experience Through Multidisciplinary Art Making (2026)
Photo: Kamila Waleszkiewicz holding Pain the Sculptor? Between Absence and Presence, a book published by Emilia Books as part of her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) practice-led research project, Emerging from Absence: A Phenomenological, Practice-Led Inquiry into Lived Experience Through Multidisciplinary Art Making (2026), seated in a wooden chair she created as part of the project. Beside her is a wooden panel based on a family photograph of Kamila with her grandmother, Mila, when Kamila was one year old. Photograph by Kamila Waleszkiewicz.
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