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25 Ilona Skladzien Ilona Skladzien has been making an impressive impact since she graduated from the MA programme at Arts University Bournemouth in 2018. Her background in furniture making, interior design and fashion, which she studied in her native Poland, initially impacted on her fi ne art practice. “It was a different way of thinking.” She worked towards a freer approach, capitalising on her fascination with and understanding of materials. Her piece Nightie was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in 2024 and in June 2025 she will be taking part in the Drawing Out Hilbre Archipelago Project , which is part of the Independent Liverpool Biennial. There are many levels to the pieces that she makes. She constructs her hangings out of paper napkins, a material “which seduced me and provided me with endless possibilities and ideas”. She tears the napkins, stitches them using her sewing machine, collects leftovers from completed works and reuses them and draws on them with a very particular marker pen which she waters down. She has been working with them for around six years and her view of them has changed. “I look at them slightly differently now I am a mum. When I started working with them I didn’t have this domestic link.” The hangings appear to be delicate and fragile but are actually quite robust. They combine vulnerability and resilience, which for her makes a connection with domesticity. “You need to have both qualities to survive as a parent.” Her explorations of doll heads comprising beautifully executed drawings alongside original doll heads that have been coated in white emulsion are intended as an exploration of domesticity and the female role. They are often hanging upside down or damaged and missing vital bits, and are frequently re- interpreted by viewers who attribute to them potentially darker intentions. Growing up in Poland, the cultural references that surrounded her were reminders of genocide. “Wherever you look, there are references to the Second World War and people’s stories from concentration camps such as Auschwitz.” She acknowledges that there is a stream within her work that digs deep into the unconscious. In reality her use of dolls as a motif arose when she observed her daughter playing with a doll. As a child Ilona says that she was a tomboy and never played with dolls. She was intrigued to observe how her daughter interacted with her toys, acting out scenarios that echoed what Ilona and her partner did. Her exhibition Play Nicely , at the The Fine Foundation Gallery at Durlston in Swanage in 2024, explored the way in which children and girls in particular have roles attributed to them because of their gender. It takes the universal call to children to behave well and to ‘play nicely’ in the school playground as a starting point. Despite her wide range of materials and her youthful ambition to be a painter, she identi fi es herself as an artist who makes drawings. Drawing is central to her practice. She will use found photographs for example when she is working on her paper napkins but, “when I am drawing on paper I tend to draw from life, because otherwise I would lose too much information”. A core element of her practice is research. She makes written notes about her projects, spends time with things that are unrelated and investigates parallel ideas, all of which give her the opportunity to let her mind wander and allow ideas to rise to the surface. Her in fl uences are the sculptor Eva Hesse because of her ability to manipulate materials, Louise Bourgeois, and El Anatsui: “I still remember seeing one of his works in Tate’s collection, where bottle caps were transformed into a beautiful, shimmering, soft-looking tapestry.” A further in fl uence is the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. whose artworks she identi fi es with because they “often speak to themes of loss of identity and the shaping of individuals through collective experience”. Fiona Robinson ilonaskladzien.com ‘LEFT BEHIND’, SHERBORNE HOUSE, 2025