4 Seasons… of Presence

4 Seasons… of Presence is my story about a woman who needs no name to be a goddess. Over the past few years, the themes of my works have oscillated around the emotional temperatures permeating the feminine substance of existence – her uniqueness, her almost supernatural power of creation, her connection with nature, but also the loss of self in favour of another. I do not refer to one specific figure – she is a contemporary expression of the “presence” of feminine energy, simultaneously embedded in the cycle of nature, in the order of the world, of mind and emotion. Her body is not a boundary but a place of transition: at times it radiates upward in golden threads, at times it dissolves into colour, into mist, into shadow.

The title deliberately departs from the literal seasons of the year, retaining only their rhythm – four phases of the same state of being a woman, at once different states of aggregation of the same force. The works gathered in the cycle show a body that is never a closed, stable form with a fixed boundary. It is almost always in the process of becoming, dissolving or emerging – surrounded by threads, lines, bands of colour that cross the edge of the skin and connect the figure with what surrounds it. Thread, root, ray and streak of colour become the main visual motif of my work, telling of the permeability of body and psyche.

The colour palette follows the emotional rhythm of the cycle – from muted, smoky darkness, through a sensual, diffused palette of blues and pinks, to earthy, rust-coloured tension and cool, extinguished gloom. The degree to which form dissolves also changes: from a silhouette barely emerging from the background, through a body fully melted into colour, to a figure carrying its own weight and finally fading into shapeless mist.

It is not an illustration of beliefs but their trace – a memory that femininity has always carried something untamed and sacred within it. It is clothed at once in fragility and sensitivity fused with strength, power and stubbornness. Contemporary life tries to tame this multidimensionality, flatten it and make it safe. The exhibition eludes that.

The presence the cycle speaks of is not passive. It is an active form of enduring – in the body, in nature, in the universe – independent of outside gaze, needing no confirmation to exist fully. The woman in these images does not represent nature or divinity – she is both, in each of her four simultaneously present phases.

Katarzyna Koch