Sylwia Suchara
Poland
Sylwia Suchara, a self-taught collage artist from Poland, holds master’s degree in education. Dealing with late-life AuDHD diagnosis and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, inspired by experiences with her pupils, she decided to revisit her artistic aspirations on her own terms.
Artist Interview
Q: Collage is such a unique medium with endless possibilities. What drew you to this art form, and how did you develop your collage-making techniques?
A: In my work, I mostly try to unearth hidden stories that have invaded my head for years. Growing up as an visually impaired child with autism and ADHD, many activities involving imagination were either unavailable to me. That is how I first started with collage as a 5 year old child, but these efforts weren’t exactly nurtured in my household. As a teenager I had many good art teachers. These people taught me about the basics of what art really is. Yet nothing ever felt right. I was told I was talented, I entered many competitions with good results, but only when I went back to the idea of assemblage, was I finally able to express myself properly.
I think on a basic level, everything already is, was and will be; everything we saw, read, watched and experienced for ourselves is a continuum of a reassembled culture—an endless transmission. Discovering collage as a medium that works the exact same way opened my mind to new possibilities and took away the anxiety of functioning in a set of rules that just never felt real to me. Collage, especially analogue, is my source of comfort and anchors me to my reality. My own technique was born out of a refusal to comply with the norms of what I was taught art was supposed to be.
Q: Your work involves using abandoned or given-away materials. How do you source these materials, and what role does their previous life or history play in your creative process?
A: All my life I struggled with hoarding paper materials. Growing old, the idea of collecting came from difficult financial situation my family experienced. When you struggle like that, art becomes redundant, you almost feel guilty thinking about it. It became logical to me to turn every available material around me into something new. This is how I discovered using found imagery as a way to materialise things no one understood about me. Analogue collage does not discriminate. It is a technique free of boundaries like money or status.