About
Artist Statement
CV
About
Paulina Berczynski is a Polish-American artist working primarily in textiles, printmaking and relational forms. Her work often employs textile collage to facilitate exchange between people from different backgrounds and communities. Paulina’s perspective is shaped by her relationship to the Solidarity movement in 1980s occupied Poland, which was instrumental in ending communist rule in the Eastern Bloc region, and propelled her family as refugees to North America.
Paulina’s work concerns collectivity and radicality, and the desire for transcendence within contemporary culture. She is interested in the friction between the personal and domestic vs. the public and political. Paulina is influenced by traditional forms such as quilts and domestic crafts, movements for social justice, utopianism (with all of its personal and cultural complications), and the aesthetics and resistance of occupied 1970-80s Poland.
Paulina maintains a studio practice and writes about radical textiles for Feral Fabric Journal, where she is also art director. She recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship to study the Polish School of Textiles from the 1960-70s in Łódż. She is a recent recipient of Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure grant for Feral Fabric Journal, and of Prelinger Library’s research residency focusing on California’s communes and back-to-the-land movements.
Paulina has lectured on contemporary textile art at the university level in the United States and in Poland. She has written for Textile: A Journal of Cloth and Culture (based in the UK), and received an artist grant from the City of Berkeley to create participatory story quilts in support of housing rights. Both individually and as half of Feral Fabric, she has led textile-based workshops with California institutions such as High Desert Test Sites, Berkeley Art Museum, NIAD Art Center and Southern Exposure. In her previous career, Paulina worked as an art director for clients including Lucky Strike and Bust Magazine. FluffyCo, her sustainable lifestyle brand, was distributed internationally in 300+ outlets and made custom products for stores such as Target, Urban Outfitters, and Crate&Barrel.
Artist Statement
CV
About
Paulina Berczynski is a Polish-American artist working primarily in textiles, printmaking and relational forms. Her work often employs textile collage to facilitate exchange between people from different backgrounds and communities. Paulina’s perspective is shaped by her relationship to the Solidarity movement in 1980s occupied Poland, which was instrumental in ending communist rule in the Eastern Bloc region, and propelled her family as refugees to North America.
Paulina’s work concerns collectivity and radicality, and the desire for transcendence within contemporary culture. She is interested in the friction between the personal and domestic vs. the public and political. Paulina is influenced by traditional forms such as quilts and domestic crafts, movements for social justice, utopianism (with all of its personal and cultural complications), and the aesthetics and resistance of occupied 1970-80s Poland.
Paulina maintains a studio practice and writes about radical textiles for Feral Fabric Journal, where she is also art director. She recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship to study the Polish School of Textiles from the 1960-70s in Łódż. She is a recent recipient of Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure grant for Feral Fabric Journal, and of Prelinger Library’s research residency focusing on California’s communes and back-to-the-land movements.
Paulina has lectured on contemporary textile art at the university level in the United States and in Poland. She has written for Textile: A Journal of Cloth and Culture (based in the UK), and received an artist grant from the City of Berkeley to create participatory story quilts in support of housing rights. Both individually and as half of Feral Fabric, she has led textile-based workshops with California institutions such as High Desert Test Sites, Berkeley Art Museum, NIAD Art Center and Southern Exposure. In her previous career, Paulina worked as an art director for clients including Lucky Strike and Bust Magazine. FluffyCo, her sustainable lifestyle brand, was distributed internationally in 300+ outlets and made custom products for stores such as Target, Urban Outfitters, and Crate&Barrel.
︎ pberczynski@cca.edu