*LEFT: A Woman’s Lifetime, 2023, Ink on paper, 26 x 21.75”*
*RIGHT: A Man’s Lifetime, 2023, Ink on paper, 26 x 21.75”*

What part of the country / world did you grow up?
I was born in Warsaw, Poland where I spent the first eleven years of my life. When I was in sixth grade, my parents, my brother and I landed in New York City, which has been my primary home since. So I would say that I grew up in both Warsaw and New York – both places shaped me from a young age.

Is there an experience that reverberates in the work?
It is tricky to pull out just one – there are so many experiences that weave into the shape that my work happens to hold in this moment. That said, this most recent body of work was undeniably catalyzed by the death of my father three years ago. I had started moving deeper into my art practice a couple of years prior, but in the weeks following his passing the practice became so much more profound, so much more necessary, and so much more alive. When my father died, even though he had been declining for some time, everything felt so surreal. It was December 2020, the whole year had felt surreal, and I found myself deeply needing to find some kind of ground – in myself, in movement, in sitting still. I also needed something to do – something to do with my hands, something to do with all that I was feeling, with all that I was not feeling, with the time I had, and the time I had lost. So I channelled it into drawing. I sat, I listened to music, and I counted. Over and over and over again. I let each mark flow from one to the next, not knowing how it would end, and one mark, one dot, one step at a time, these beautiful, ethereal forms were born.

You currently live in New York and spend time in New Mexico – how did you end up in those two places? I fell madly in love with northern New Mexico when I took a month-long break during a very intense chapter of my New York City life back in 2014 and I came out to wander and explore a place I knew nothing about. People I met kept asking me what I was doing, and the only answer that made sense at the time was that I was just “being” for a while. Almost every year since, one layer of synchronicity after another kept bringing me back for short visits, and when the world changed in 2020 and working remotely became less of an anomaly in our lives, I started experimenting with spending several months out of the year in New Mexico. Thanks to the above-mentioned synchronicities, places to stay started to materialize and for the last two years I’ve come back to the same spot I love where I continue to squirrel away more and more of my things.

Are there specific areas of New Mexico that you gravitate to?
Over the years I’ve spent time in various areas north of Santa Fe, gravitating toward tiny towns and wild, out of the way places. Coming from New York, the contrast of land and sky stretching as far as the eye can see, hearing coyotes howling out the back door, and having the nearest grocery store far beyond any reasonable walking distance, is what drew me to these places. There is New York, population 8.46 million, and then there is a desert village with a population of 150 – this contrast is precisely what I love and what my soul craves. My spirit needs both ends of the spectrum, both extremes. I have always been fascinated and inspired by polarities, dualities, dichotomies and paradoxes. I embody many within myself and they fuel me and my work. And I love how these two different environments affect and influence my work, how the work changes depending on where I am.

*LEFT: Emotional Landscape, 2023, charcoal, pastel & ink on paper, 21 9/16 x 30”.*
*CENTER + RIGHT: Process.*

Can you share about your design firm KMIP? What projects are you excited about?

Kiss Me I’m Polish is a visual design studio which turns 20 years old this year – I can’t even believe it. I started the business to be able to do the work I wanted to do, to not be pigeon-holed as one type of visual designer specializing in X, Y or Z – and to be able to pick and choose the clients I work with. And it has been such an wild and amazing ride over the last 20 years. And it’s been hard, and it’s been intense, and right now it’s pretty darn wonderful. We are a small team and we work with a really diverse range of clients on bringing their vision or their story or their unique content offering to life – visually, and also conceptually. At this very moment we are working on digital education initiatives with a music organization, environmental graphics for a media company, a cultural app prototype, a place-based history website, branding for a new bookstore, and a new online exhibition for a historical institute. Every project requires something unique, every project reveals something new, every project is unlike any other project we’ve done before. Historically, a lot of our work has also focused on information design and data visualization so it’s perhaps also not a coincidence that visualizing abstract and complex concepts is such a present thread in my art work.

How do you balance an art practice and a design business?

It’s those dualities again. The two are not always in perfect balance, or the kind of balance that my mind would like, but they do find a way to flow together, side by side. I don’t follow any kind of pre-set schedule or structure – part of me wishes I did, but anytime I’ve tried to, it just simply didn’t work. Each week and each day, has a different flow, different deadlines, different characteristics, and so the flow is the structure. There are days when I can spend the first part of the day creating and exploring in the flow of my art practice, and then the afternoon is devoted to the business and design work. There are days where it’s the opposite – design work in the morning and creative time in the afternoon and/or evening. And there are days where it’s all of one and none of the other. Because the business is client based, the struggle there is that its needs and its deadlines can sometimes take precedence over the sometimes less tangible and often less loud needs of the creative practice, but over time that has become less and less of an issue as the art practice gets stronger and stronger and its deadlines and needs are getting louder and louder. And when things are really flowing well, I find that my art practice and my design business even speak to each other and influence each other, which is always interesting in surprising and wonderful ways.

Your Instagram handle and website are sublime/ordinary – what does that mean to you?

I believe that the sublime can be found within what we typically perceive as the most ordinary. And the opposite is also true – that what we perceive as most sublime, is also quite ordinary – it is not some otherworldly thing but whatever is right under our noses. I make art of, from, about, with, in and for, every day life.

Breathing Sleep (7,680 breaths / 8 hours)
2023, Ink on paper, 28 x 21 3/4”

A current series in your artwork is based in time and beautifully depicts the passage of time through days or through breaths, can you tell us about where that springs from?

In those first few weeks after my father died, when I made the first drawing that would be the beginning of the lifetime portrait series, making the work was not only about seeking solace and an outlet for the loss I felt, it was also driven by a desire to more deeply process and embody what it meant for someone to have lived 74 years, and what it meant to have shared 44 of those years with him. What does the shape of that life journey look like? What does the shape of that time look like? Our structures and experiences of time are often intangible and often also abstract – an hour is a human construct, a week is a construct, so is a month. However, a day as a unit of time is a physical, embodied experience – the earth makes a full rotation over the course of a single day, and as the sun rises, then sets, then rises again, our body feels and knows it. And so the unit of a day has become a tangible and fundamental building block of most of my drawings. As has the breath, and a heartbeat.

I appreciate how time and breath is embedded in the making of your work as well, are you working on a couple at a time?

No. I work on a single drawing at a time. Each piece takes several days to complete, and each one is a unique journey in and of itself, so I let each drawing unfold and run its full course, before starting another.

How would you describe a studio session?

Maybe it’s the nature of these particular drawings or just how sacred each studio session feels to me (since that time is such a precious resource), a session in the studio often feels like a ritual. I usually start by brewing a cup of my favorite tea (with oat milk and honey), I light some palo santo (one of my favorite scents ever), sometimes a candle too. I set my phone on do-not-disturb (can’t have a call or a message screw up my count), queue up a playlist, set up my supplies and slowly dive in. Since each drawing requires focus and a clear head that can count without losing track, I don’t listen to podcasts or talking or anything with strong vocals, I don’t talk on the phone, I don’t do anything other than being fully with and in the flow of the work. An ideal studio session will be AT LEAST two hours, ideally three or four. Anything less just feels like a tease.

*LEFT: Studio, Brooklyn, NY.*
*RIGHT: Constant Change, 2023, Ink on paper, 27 x 19”*

You shared that your father kept meticulous details about his life in a calendar, is there a way that you are keeping a record? Do you keep a journal or a sketchbook?

Yes, I keep both. I love to write first thing in the morning – the kind of free-form “brain drain” writing that Julia Cameron advocated for in the “Artist’s Way.” And I keep detailed process notes in a sketchbook as I work on each drawing. I keep count of all of the marks, the time each drawing session takes, I test, sketch and annotate. My sketchbooks are the unfiltered behind-the-scenes view of how each drawing comes together. They’re like the messy loose threads on the back of a tapestry, which I often find as beautiful as the front.

What books are on your nightstand right now?

I love that you phrased this question as plural – because you know there is a pile of books on my nightstand, not just one. Currently in rotation / in the queue:

“How We Live Is How We Die” by Pema Chödrön

“World as Lover, World as Self” by Joanna Macy

“The Mystic Heart” by Wayne Teasdale

“Einstein’s Dreams” by Alan Lightman

“Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” by Lawrence Weschler

Find Agnieszka on instagram

16 | Artist profile: Agnieszka Gasparska