About

Aleksandra Zawada was born in Poland. From 2007 to 2011 she studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art. In 2009, she traveled to Kyoto, Japan, studying as an exchange student. The experience proved to be formative to her practice and the way she thinks about materials and making. In 2012, the RSA Barns Graham Award took her to China, where she spent three months researching ideas of copy and original, authenticity and fake. A residency in Italy the following year confirmed what remains central to her practice: working in dialogue with specific artists, moving between past and present, while actively looking here and now.

Interested in what we choose to preserve, how we categorize: people and objects, and how we assign value, AZ’s  works merge past with a visual narrative of her own. From 2018 Zawada turned to 3D work, working in sculpture in ceramics.  Her works are hand built and figurative. She focuses on simple form.

“Her work, characterized by its immediacy, unpolished finish, and inventive forms, shows a deep reverence for the past, while forging a distinct path forward. Despite the differences in scale and style, Zawada absorbs and confronts historical influences, integrating them into her own unique expressions in painting, sculpture, and photography. “ ( Ben Uri Research Records, 2025)

In 2020 AZ became British. She continues to live and work in Edinburgh, exhibiting locally and on occasion beyond.

I think art, if it’s meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.  

John Baldessari 

Sculptures

AZ ceramic works seem to be at odds with times they are made in. Figurative, relic-looking, simple in form and not attention grabbing. Playful works (with at times funny titles) are executed with economy, modest in scale, with few, sparse details. Minimal, not overworked forms, somehow have presence and feel deliberate. They could have stepped out of the cartoon or have been an unearthed artefact. Goddesses, creatures, guardians, many women, some men, spiritual, totemic-looking objects of worship without disclosed story or provenance; without usefulness or function. AZ works are whimsical, at times puzzling, her influences are nuanced, but they resurface regularly varying from ancient to contemporary and anything between. She works with one off hand-built forms mainly in earthenware.  Since 2023, she has been experimenting with work in bronze.

Painting 

AZ’s paintings are a dialogue of minimal and colour.  Her paintings are inseparable from drawing: ephemeral, tactile - to the point of looking casually scribbled.  They are raw, flat, immediate, “unconcerned with finish”, rough. They are as immediate, as they are restrained: in number of colours within one work, in the way they are unscrupulously edited out to the final set /series linked by a title.  Her work carries something enduring, recalling graffiti, carving or a scroll. 

Photography

Her photography started with looking at photographs and photo books. After making her first photo book at the foundation year, she has continued to work in photography, slowly establishing independent photographic body of work.

She has worked in photography in parallel with other aspects of her practice, approaching projects with book form in mind. Her photography focuses on blurred line between reality and representation, negotiating space between witnessed and surveyed by camera and what is retold as a multi-layered story. She often plays with photographic working methods, challenging the limits of photography to be an objective, believable witness. Her photographs explore ideas of how we look, what we choose to see and how we process visual in world saturated in images.