Conversation with dr Małgorzata Karczmarzyk
Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Education, Laboratory of Media Education
How do you understand the concept of sustainable development, taking into account your scientific and artistic achievements?
Doctor Małgorzata Karczmarzyk: I understand this term as holistically as possible. In recent years, a significant change in the perception of culture has been visible all over the world, towards giving it a much greater role in development processes. Other, broader perspectives of sustainable development have emerged. It’s no longer just about the ecological dimension, coexisting with the economic pillar, now the social aspect has become visible. Recently, the cultural dimension of sustainable development has also begun to be taken into account, and attention has been paid to the role of various stakeholders in the process of initiating and implementing changes and the relationships between them. My projects in the fields of culture, art and pedagogy combine these needs and fit into the sustainable development goals: they inspire, support the innovation and creativity of individuals, provoke relationships between people, promote their common interests and goals, and organise the community.
Sustainable development is not only about external activities in the field of culture, it’s about searching for equilibrium within oneself, building oneself in order to be able to enter into dialogue with another (someone different in culture, identity, or experience). My projects in the field of art and pedagogy are about searching for this balance. These include exhibitions of my own work, but also of students’ works, the “Painting Dialogues” project which I will be happy to tell you more about, promoting talents, paying attention to the creative development of an individual.
You carry out many scientific and artistic projects. What exactly do you do?
I create projects for interdisciplinary activities, but mainly I try to combine my two beloved disciplines, namely art and pedagogy. My scientific and artistic projects are based on cooperation and communication between various environmental groups. Initiatives that I’ve implemented include projects related to the semiotic analysis of images, children’s graphic language, visual communication, visual literacy, children’s depiction of difficult topics, taboo topics such as death, illness and war. I also deal with tutoring, helping excluded individuals and people with disabilities, I look for opportunities to speak with a “different” voice through emancipation through art, art pedagogy, and pedagogical intervention.
The examples of my grants with co-researchers include: “Meanings and communication potential of a six-year-old child’s drawing”, in which the project manager was Prof. Maria Mendel, PhD, or a grant entitled “A child in a virtual gallery. Analysis of selected websites of large museums”, carried out with co-researcher Doctor Natalia Pater-Ejgierd, or the last research project on the basis of which I published a book entitled “Polska sztuka współczesna w oczach dzieci i dorosłych. Potencjał pedagogiczny, komunikacyjny oraz kulturowy wybranych obrazów Jacka Yerki, Tomasza Sętowskiego, Rafała Olbińskiego i Zdzisława Beksińskiego”. Paintings belonging to contemporary art can also be a space for building meanings between a child and an adult.
Sustainable development is not only about external activities in the field of culture, it’s about searching for equilibrium within oneself, building oneself in order to be able to enter into dialogue with another (someone different in culture, identity, or experience).
Other projects that I’m currently carrying out include my latest pedagogical and artistic venture called “Dialogue of Art” or “Painting Dialogue”, related to painting, pedagogical intervention, performance, in which I try to reach a diverse audience, and the project “Look at Me”, which I am running in co-authorship. My projects are devoted to building a platform for dialogue, a different cultural space where art strengthens us and provides balance for difficult things that are happening around us. Everything can be expressed in art. It often helps us to release our emotions, fears and frustrations. In such difficult times as we are currently in, we simply need art.
This is also how I understand sustainable development – as a search for holistic action based on the fourth pillar of culture, finding a type of different space that would build the individual from his creative side, creating art, and at the same time focus on finding a way of communication between existing works, which would create an intergenerational dialogue.
Who are usually the recipients of your works? Are they students, or rather connoisseurs, or maybe ordinary people?
I try to make sure that my works reach a diverse audience – adults, teenagers and children. I show my paintings in commercial and non-commercial galleries, in Poland and abroad. I’ve already had about 60 individual and collective exhibitions, in Poland and abroad. I’ve had exhibitions in Turkey, Ireland, Portugal, Lithuania, Kiev, Kirovograd, Rome, Munich, India, Berlin, and of course also in Poland: in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Poznań, Kraków, Toruń. I’ve cooperated a lot with the Lisbon University of Technology. Now I’ve started interesting cooperation with the University of Verona. I also organise exhibitions of my students’ works, which are created during my classes, in the art studio, at the Institute of Pedagogy. Young people really want their artistic activities to be appreciated and noticed. This is also important from the perspective of their future work as teachers. This is how school and kindergarten teachers learn how they should work with their future pupils’ art.
I fondly remember the meeting to which I was invited by the then Director of the University Kindergarten – Dr Katarzyna Kmita Zaniewska, during which the children saw my works and were inspired by them to create their own artworks. This project concerned familiarising the child with artistic crafts and inviting various artists. Contact with the work of artists previously unknown to the wider public was an important event and a stimulus for recipients representing various groups in the local community. The selection of artists invited to cooperate became an opportunity for social change and consolidation of the positive perception of art as inclusive, engaged and heterogeneous. Art must be learned from an early age, if this creativity is not there, later, in adult life, we will exclude ourselves from it. Artists’ children go to vernissages with their parents from an early age, so when they grow up, it’s normal for them to participate in cultural life. Contact with art helps them, and the more difficult the message, the more developing it is. We focus only on easy, pleasant messages too often, but if we want to develop, it’s just like with a text – the more difficult the work to read, the harder our mind works.
I’ve also participated in numerous competitions and scientific and artistic programmes. One of them was, for example, the “Locus” project, during which, together with co-author Marta Domańska, we showed the city of Gdańsk in collages, drawings and photos. The idea was to illustrate the space of our local culture and show places that were familiar in a different way, giving our own visual interpretation. In turn, the capital of Portugal – Lisbon – referred to its city identity. So it was a kind of dialogue between both cities: Lisbon and Gdańsk.
Referring to the dialogue, I’d like to ask you to expand on this issue. What are “Painting Dialogues”, that is, the creative method you use? What does it look like and what does it involve?
The method of visual-verbal dialogue was born out of the intention of joint creative activities with artists, but over time it expanded its potential to include the pedagogical, communicative and therapeutic scope. The method was created on the basis of a project implemented since 2016 called “Painting Dialogues”. Initially, this project assumed the work with artists, but over time, it turned out that it had a developing, therapeutic and creative impact on groups such as tutors, academic teachers, early education teachers, kindergarten teachers, but also children of preschool and early school age and children with disabilities (e.g. autism).
My method enables one’s own creative expression in simultaneous dialogue with others. It can be a spouse, daughter, son, neighbour, friend, or acquaintance, but also a stranger whom we get to know thanks to a common painting dialogue. Joint artistic activity brings people closer together and helps them survive difficult times. It’s not only art therapy, communication and contact with another person but also getting to know oneself during a creative activity.
In short, it’s an activity that involves painting a work together. You could say that it’s “trivial”, but what happens during such a painting dialogue is no longer a clichéd process. Visual language, without words, suddenly becomes a plane of different communication and people who have verbalisation switched off begin to enter into relationships and get to know themselves on a different plane. I invite people of various professions from all over Poland and the world to join us in a visual conversation. Painting dialogue workshops that I have already carried out include cooperation with the Foundation for the Development of the University of Gdańsk, workshops carried out as part of the Sustainable Development Day at the University of Gdańsk, artistic workshops for the winter school: YoPeNET Gdańsk Winter School, cooperation with the Baltic Sea Cultural Centre in Gdańsk as part of the “AMPLIFY. Make The Future of Europe Yours” project and workshops for the Academic Cultural Centre of the University of Gdańsk.
While painting with different groups and with people of different ages and professions, I’ve noticed that a certain space of meaning is created between us. We ourselves enter the self-therapeutic process of self-analysis and, on this basis, we rebuild our thinking, unblock ourselves, abandon stereotypes and patterns, but above all, we open up to our own creation.
Where did the idea for this form of artistic dialogue come from?
I admit that I had my first dialogue a long time ago when I was a child… it was a drawing dialogue with my mother. I remember sitting on a bed, covered with a white blanket, with my mother. There were pieces of paper and crayons spread out everywhere. I watched her draw and then I completed some of the symbols of her, of our shared drawing.
I remember that my mother drew me beautiful carriages, princesses, cars, animals, characters, and I changed them, added my own symbols and colours. This is how we got to know each other and communicated with each other through drawing, differently than in everyday life, which has completely different rules for coexistence between adults and children. We understood each other without words. We created cartoon worlds that were our alternative places, where the principles of partnership, equality, love, affection and reciprocity prevailed.
Much later, when I was an academic lecturer, I encountered tutoring at the university. Thanks to the tutor and lecturer – Doctor Beata Karpińska-Musiał, I completed a tutoring course and became involved in running a student group. During the time devoted to our meetings, in addition to the methods and tools that I learned during the course, I decided to use drawings and visualisations for tutoring conversations with students. While advising them, I automatically analysed my own development. I was looking for my own path of development, just like they were looking for theirs. At that time, I didn’t realise that when analysing, discussing and conveying certain views, I was also implementing them in my own life. And so, at some point, I just started painting with other people. The first attempts were in a small size, and very spontaneous. I drew with friends, with children, with adults, and with artists I met during my pedagogical and artistic path. Later, there was a need for a larger format and watercolour painting. This is how the first “Painting Dialogues” were created, which I began to run periodically, inviting artists, educators, teachers, musicians, poets, etc. to work together.
It all started with one joint painting painted in watercolour, in the privacy of a private studio, and later the project was conceived that is currently evolving further and deeper. As it turns out, a painting dialogue is a great method of communicating with another person, especially in the case of a difficult form of communication, e.g. when someone doesn’t know the words and needs to communicate, they can do it through a symbol or drawing sign. We negotiate meanings in various ways.
Does it mean that this way you can also get to know the other person’s character? When you form a group, can you immediately see and try to assign the social roles of specific dialogue participants?
Exactly. It was visible, for example, in the child-parent relationship, when the son or daughter became natural leaders in the painting dialogue. The perspective and situational context changed the form of mutual communication, the parental authority relationship gave way to partnership and negotiation. However, depending on the personality traits of a given child and parent, different styles, social roles, mutual mimetic behaviours, learning, and action patterns could be observed.
Adults are often very blocked and it requires a lot of effort to open them. When they engage in such a creative game with me and start painting intuitively, they unconsciously release a lot of bad emotions. They shed social masks and roles that block their instincts, and they change into people they are not and who they might like to be. Thanks to such spiritual, aesthetic and cognitive reconstruction and cleansing, their higher-order needs are met. And this, in turn, builds a community that can take care of the needs of other individuals in the future. What I mean here is sustainable development. After painting dialogues with me, people leave with positive energy and want to continue acting – not necessarily in art. We need creation everywhere, in every profession. Thanks to it, we have a spark, we are open to the world, we are creative and we want to change things in various areas and create a better world.
How do you perceive the potential of culture as the fourth pillar of Sustainable Development?
The fourth pillar, i.e. culture and cultural heritage, can inspire and support innovation and creativity in other sectors (it’s believed, among others, that cultural diversity affects creativity), and also play an important role in formal and informal education. In some areas, the key dimension of the impact of the cultural sector and cultural heritage on development will be shaping the level and quality of life, ensuring and enabling the local community to meet higher-order needs (including spiritual, aesthetic, and cognitive ones). Activities related to culture may significantly influence the spatial development and aesthetics of cities and municipalities. The role of culture in creating and strengthening social capital can also be very important. My project of painting dialogues strengthens such capital because it has communicative, art-therapeutic and pedagogical potential.
Building social capital means building people, enabling them to self-develop, expand cultural competences, which in Poland we have a problem with, because we exclude ourselves from culture and art, in the sense that we don’t go to galleries, vernissages, we don’t teach our children how to perceive contemporary art, we browse, not look at images because we no longer have time to contemplate them. Therefore, in classes with students, I analyse art as an “open work” (this is Umberto Eco’s concept). We look for meanings in various details, we simply look at a given work and don’t browse it, as we do when looking at Instagram, Facebook and other social media.
Also through my dialogues, I want to disseminate and acquaint people with contemporary art and I want to do it in various social environments. People I work with often say “No, I can’t paint, I have no talent”, but it turns out that great paintings are created and they are delighted with the effect and their own work. This happened, for example, during the “Amplify” project carried out with the students of the University of Gdańsk. An important conclusion resulting from the students’ work was drawing attention to visual language, which offers more possibilities, a better form of communication at a higher level, and also establishes a participatory grassroots form of democracy. Art has emancipatory potential that offers individuals an opportunity to express themselves in a broader way without any imposed framework. While working together, the participants worked out solutions, rules of work and community.
It turns out that visual language provides us with a chance to establish a relationship with a partner, a sense of a slightly different communication plane, and gives us an opportunity to enter into the so-called “third space” in which understanding can be based on the principle of contrasting elements and feeling. Thanks to creative work, we feel differently and talk to each other differently.
Activities related to culture may have a significant impact on the spatial development and aesthetics of cities and municipalities. This is a consequence of the fact that these people start to think more aesthetically and look at the surrounding world in a different way. The role of culture in creating and strengthening social capital will be very important here, and my project “Dialogues of Art” builds it. My activity has communication, therapeutic, pedagogical and emancipatory potential because I give people the freedom to create. It’s also related to the need to familiarise oneself with the artistic material through one’s own activity.
Do you know people who discovered their passion after painting dialogues, or after encountering art in general? For example, did they start painting and make a living from it?
Of course. I painted with artists who were blocked in their work. One example was a woman who didn’t paint at all because she was raising children. When we started painting together, I told her that I would open her and that I hoped that somehow I would be able to remove this blockage. Now she creates on her own, exhibits her works, shows them to the world, has her own gallery, sells her art and exhibits other artists’ paintings. The project of “painting dialogues” was the beginning of her activity and career.
“Painting Dialogues” are for everyone – I paint with various people, not only with artists. My point is to make people used to abstract painting. Personally, I also encourage participants of my workshops to look at good but difficult images that may seem strange and shocking. This is what builds us and creates the potential we talk about in sustainable development, to develop in a holistic way, at every level. In life we use images. When we create them, we draw from resources. When we watch them, we recharge. You can’t create something out of nothing. Therefore, when painting a given work of art, we even unconsciously recall images known, for example, from television, cinema, book illustrations, cartoons.
Our brain is like a warehouse with hundreds of thousands of images on thousands of shelves. However, it doesn’t always function properly. Sometimes we litter it, sometimes we forget to dust it, and then our artistic potential runs dry. We lack images or they are too damaged and are not suitable for creative use. Julia Cameron compares this warehouse to a pond of creativity that dries up if we don’t take care of it properly. We must take care of optical hygiene and look at outstanding works of art.
What challenges will the Culture and Creative sector face in the coming years?
This sector is based on cultural values or on various types of artistic, individual and collective creative expression. It contributes to the continuous development of society and is of key importance for the creation of a shared sense of European identity, culture and values. These are sectors based on knowledge, creativity and talent of people, constituting a source of significant economic wealth. They are crucial to creating a common sense of European identity, culture and values. It is about creative, intercultural, and intergenerational dialogue, and this is what I have developed in the “Painting Dialogue”.
The search for community and a sense of European identity is important, for example in the context of the immigrants’ situation. We are constantly looking for ideas on how to build a common community with Ukrainians. What we want is a plane of understanding, contact, closeness and help. My “Painting Dialogues” can help in such integration. My idea is that Polish women should paint with Ukrainian women and I’ll definitely do everything to carry out this project. I believe that this can give strength and solace to women who went through the horrors of war by venting their frustration, what they experienced in Ukraine and what they are now struggling with in Poland as refugees. It’s a way to overcome blockages, tensions, fears and frustrations.
Perhaps we should refer to these ideological conflicts of recent years and the increased influx of immigrants. What activities in the area of culture can help strengthen social awareness in Poland?
First of all, building cohesion, solidarity, tolerance, communication with others, including excluded individuals. If I paint with someone in the “Painting Dialogue”, I give them space and freedom to create and I’m open to the other person and cooperation with them, no matter whether it’s a child, a refugee, a person with a disability or a great artist. My dialogues are about equality. The space for joint creative work has no rules, limitations, principles or techniques that would block a given movement or creation of a dialogue participant. It’s a creative activity based on the positive energy that I give to people in the creative process. Art and art workshops can catalyse development at the local level, thanks to the diverse social, cultural, and material resources that communities can use.
The role of sustainable development in the field of culture is also to strengthen social capital – in particular by providing a basis for the activities of poor, marginalised groups, thanks to which their self-respect and productivity can increase, as well as raising respect for diversity and social inclusion so that these groups can participate in the benefits of economic development.
Thanks to culture and art, we can build a community of beautiful, great people and holistically cooperate with them to build the future.