VICTORIAN artist Gosia Wlodarczak has won this year’s $15,000 Fremantle print award.

The artist’s large digital print Process Capsule Situations Sofitel documents her time as artist-in-residence at the Sofitel hotels in Melbourne and Sydney where she was given unprecedented access to both front- and back-of-house.

Wlodarczak spent exactly 30 minutes drawing in the hotels’ suites, restaurants, lobbies, offices, engineering departments—even the toilets—exploring the differences between personal and shared spaces.

Partner Longin Sarnecki documented everything with his camera.

“So the process I am using is Longin documents all my processes, and then I use his photographs not just for archiving, but to create new works,” Wlodarczak told the Herald.

Opening every photograph taken, she used Photoshop’s “magic wand” to select an element to transfer to a new digital “canvas”.

While she had some subconscious input into the selection of elements, she’d basically set parameters for the computer because she wanted it to have control over determining the image.

• Gosia Wlodarczak and her award-winning print. Photo by Steve Grant

Wlodarczak, whose love of printmaking started by cutting and stamping potatoes as a child in her native Poland, says giving up control of her work is something she does to escape the “anxiety and fear” of not knowing when the work is complete.

To overcome the dread of being the all-powerful artist, she insists that Sarnecki provide constant chatter while they work. He sighs it can be difficult to maintain.

“I might stop to look at things and she’ll go ‘Longin, I need to work — Longin’,” he laughs.

Wlodarczak says the final composition aims to create a new “universe” with individual elements hanging on membranes in space before being crunched down into two dimensions.

She says it was impulse that drove her towards a composition that “from the centre blasts outwards”.

The final picture captures moments in time, she says.

The three judges note Wlodarczak’s work is a “celebration of looking, and looking closely”.

“What at first appears to be a Rorschach unravels upon closer inspection—details are not simply mirrored but defined through their subtle differences.

“The complex digital print captures the sites and sensations of the hotel as a personalised space and an elaborate memoir of the artist,” their judgement says.
Perth artist Susanna Castleden, a guest tutor at FAC, took out second place with a 30-metre long work that documents through rubbings her voyage from Rottnest Island to Bermuda—which are almost exactly opposite on the globe.

by STEVE GRANT