This piece was the first one in the „Take a Deep Breath” series that I started creating in 2020. Over a year ago we moved to a small village to be closer to nature, to be near the forest. I often go there for walks with my dog, it gives me tranquility and inspiration and the dog gets a run. During one of such walks it started to drizzle. The rain, the forest that started to smell differently, the silence and the droplets around put me in a nostalgic mood. It was late autumn, the forest was almost ready for a sleep and the dominant colors were gray and brown. The trees had long since lost their leaves, which covered the ground around (tego kawałka o mchu nie rozumiem więc skracam)
At that moment, I noticed a beech tree that stood to the right of my path. The tree had a great amount of lichens, mosses, fungi on it and the color connections they created with each other left me in awe. I stood there in the rain gazing at something artistic created by nature. This moment was like a missing puzzle piece, a vision of my work formed, a sense of moving and walking in the woods came together.

Mosses and lichens gave me clarity to my art vision.
They gave me the ability to communicate what I was feeling, they became a stimulus to think, grow and act.

The main lichens are Lepraria and Gloeophyllum.

Philosophy of the Take a Deep Breath series

To live in urban areas, people give up their privacy and live in cramped spaces, often only a few square meters large.
Concrete buildings are getting bigger and higher on the external structure, but smaller and tighter on the inside – this is the urban growth paradox.

Cities with their masses of people are the reason why we begin to suffocate.

Endless factories, highways, cities bind us with pollution, smog, viruses. All of this makes our breath shallow and short. To save ourselves, we cover our faces with masks.

Due to civilisation development, growing number of people and expansion of urban areas, we lose wild backwoods. They become rare luxury goods to which only few have access.

Trees impact our wellbeing. They purify the air we are breathing and produce volatile substances that are helpful in treatment of respiratory diseases, essential oils which have calming effects.

Contact with nature calms, regenerates, cleanses and inspires us.

Lichens are the result of a symbiosis between two different elements – algae and fungi. Their fascinating feature is that most of the species occur only in places where the air is very clean, unpolluted by the human hand.

The work „Take a deep breath” is a combination of wet and dry felting, and embroidery. For the work, Australian merino wool was used on a beech frame.

With this work, I want to invite you to the forest, so that we can take together a….

…Deep breath.

Technical matters

This work combines several handicraft techniques. To achieve more spatial feel, groundwork was made of worsted wool from various sheep and by using the wet felting method. This technique guarantees that each material is unique due to the specificity of the process. To create moss I started by mixing together different green wool fibers and then I attached those wool balls to the base with the felting needle.
The lichens are embroidered with cotton thread and by using traditional stitches such as french knot, turkey tail and buttonhole.I adjust and modify the embroidery techniques according to the project needs, so as to make threads and fibers as similar as possible to the plants found in the forest.
I try to use old traditional techniques in a modern way.