Light beyond paint.

I began Firefly and Fish on New Year’s Eve 2022 and finished it in spring 2023. I made it during an illness and a return to art after a creative impasse. Working on it was also connected with what I was doing in film at the time.

I design and build mechatronic elements, bringing mechanics, electronics and programming together so that physical objects can move or emit light. During that period, I made such elements for the French production Faun, the Polish-British production Ro and the Polish production Dziewczyna Szatana.

I brought that experience of light and movement into the painting. I showed the fish in successive phases of a jump. Pearl-white paint in the water changes how the surface appears in the light. The firefly is an LED: a circuit behind the work allows a real light to shine above the painted pond.

These three elements work differently. The fish’s movement is read through its successive positions. The pearl paint responds to illumination, while the LED becomes a source of light itself. They belong to one composition — and to my practice, in which film, technology and painting meet through making a physical object.