AUTHOR | WORK

Elżbieta Łubowicz – Stanisław Dróżdż
Conversation

– How do the concepts for your works appear? Do you come up with some particular ideas?

– I do not come up with them. They come up to me.

– Does it happen in every case?

– I do not consider myself to be the author of my works. I am only a tool in God’s hands. That is like a locksmith and his pliers. Do the pliers know what they serve for?

– And where does the idea of ‘door handles’ stem from? (‘Klamki’ – ‘door handles’ – untitled work realised in the Contemporary Art Centre Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 1999).

– These are the ‘door handles’ which led me to the concept of ‘fishing lines’ (the work entitled Poezja konkretna [Concrete Poetry], presented in Foksal Gallery in Warsaw in 2002 – EŁ) but I had not realised that it was so until I produced the ‘fishing lines’. In the ‘door handles’, the outlines of the door are drawn but it would have been better if there had been a real door opening to the wall. In the ‘door handles’ the door opened in half on the ceiling and the viewer could imagine that they opened not to the wall but to something unknown. This door led to nowhere. The ‘fishing lines’ led to infinity but, in fact, they ended. They intersected in one point in the space.

– Was that the point where the eyes of the viewer standing inside the gallery could have been fixed upon?

– Exactly. That is what I meant to achieve.

– So does it mean that the works in-between, ‘door handles’ and ‘fishing lines’ are aligned along the same line of thinking? Are they subsequent stages of the same?

– In-between, ‘door handles’ and ‘fishing lines’ are almost all the same. But they are not subsequent stages of the same but the same of subsequent stages. That is something like following the spiral. Nowadays, for instance, I am returning to the inspiration from my youth, to Cortazar, but I approach his works in a different way. I am thinking of creating a four-directional alphabet and construct Hopscotch out of it. In this book, the pages would be like the hours in the clock. When one reaches the starting point, it will develop inside, underside. The beginning remains outside, on the top.

– I cannot imagine such a four-directional alphabet.

– It is very good since I can imagine it.

January 2009