Passage I

charcoal on paper

This is the first in a series of three drawings I made. In them, I try to capture what it feels like to leave a world behind—and to enter into a new one, full of grief and apprehension and hope. The drawings in the hourglass come from photos I’ve taken myself at different points in my life, and rendering them in charcoal hints at the making and remaking of memories, even if we believe they might be solid. In the beginning, the memories of the initial home are larger in the mind, but the change is about to happen—there is still a lof of sand left to fall in the hourglass. Older memories are slowly being transformed into something else, something newer: an outline of a city that’s vague and unfamiliar at the moment but has the potential to become known.

Hi! I’m Karolina, a 21-year-old from Szczecin, Poland. My family immigrated to the US when I was 14, and we currently live in Pennsylvania. A lot of my art centers around immigration, memory, and language, though, as a studio art and computer science double major, I am also very interested in people’s relationship with technology and navigating physical and virtual or imaginary worlds in daily life.
 

Passage II

charcoal on paper

The second drawing is a little more balanced, and we can see the hourglass up close. Change is well underway, becoming very visible and pretty much undeniable, even if we might try to cling to the old memories (there is a slightly greater focus on the top half of the hourglass, but not by much). The text overlaid on the drawing is also more visible here—the two languages, Polish and English, are reaching an imbalance, with there being more English than Polish now—by just a little bit. And more English words are pouring in from the top of the page to fill up the background, even as the central figure is defined as Polish. The text I’ve used here is a diary entry written in Polish on the day my family arrived in the States, and one of the many poems I’ve written in English since immigrating. One is history, the other is a new creation that could not have happened without the change.

Passage III

charcoal on paper

Lastly, nearly all the sand has poured down to the bottom of the hourglass, and the English background has darkened—perhaps the new change was not so ideal. Or perhaps the past has now become idealized, since the inside of the hourglass is brighter now. The images within are images of transition, invoking parts of what one might see from a car. The top image is of a sign typical of the EU—of Polish streets—while at the bottom, the text in the mirror is written in English. The change is nearly complete, yet there is so much more change forshadowed—especially since the hourglass is tipped in this drawing, hinting at the fact that life’s big changes are not yet done, and another big event is bound to happen soon. The English language has settled—there are no more new words pouring down—but the Polish language is still trapped and cramped in the hourglass, forever tied to the process of change with no visible escape.