maja-godlewska.squarespace.com
Fulbright to Poland 2012

Purchase instructions: email info@fulbright.org with artist name & details of art piece

My creative interests have been centered on nature travel and the landscape in the age of electronic devices and social media. I have been researching the spectacle of global tourism in search of the Sublime landscape, consuming the wilderness, an anthropocentric, Enlightenment era construct assuming that as humans, we are forever alien entities. I have shadowed travelers in the most instagrammable destinations, including Mauritius, Sicily, Iceland, Greenland, Tasmania and mainland Australia, Florida Keys and dozens of North American National and State Parks.

While I observe tourists and address human-nature interface, humans have become increasingly absent from my work. Watercolor paper installations are my attempts at creating environments that would invite unhurried examination, for the viewer to follow their meandering form and variegated surfaces. They are my slow, defiant responses to the fast paced insta-consumption of the landscape in the pre-Covid19 world. These laborious works are meant to remind us of a simple act of being in nature, or really maybe just being. They are my meditations on places that I have seen, invitations to contemplate, to remember…to put the camera away.

Maja Godlewska, Associate Professor of Painting at the Department of Art and Art History, UNC Charlotte, NC, U.S.A; MFA in Painting, Academy of Fine Art and Design, Wroclaw, Poland in 1990. Godlewska’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 100 solo and group shows at variety of venues, including Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, APT London, UK, Burnie Regional Gallery, Tasmania, Australia, c.r.e.t.a. rome, Rome, Italy and Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw, Poland. She has been a recipient of grants and fellowships, including Fulbright Scholarship, two North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Awards, several Charlotte Arts and Science Council grants, Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship and Tempus Mobility Grant from the European Union; she participated in artist-in-residence programs in the United States, Australia, Chile, France, Spain, Iceland, Greenland, Mauritius and South Korea. Godlewska has been a 2019 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tasmania Cradle Coast, working on a collaborative project with local community, titled Landscape: a Place Remembered and Imagined.