NATALIA ZAGORSKA-THOMAS

In In Absentia, absence becomes a generative force. Each work operates in the space left behind by former uses, owners and gestures: what remains when function dissolves; what persists after care has stopped; what stories linger when bodies are no longer present. Zagorska-Thomas’s practice centres on repair, fragility, resurrection, and the quiet but insistent force of ordinary objects to carry universal human themes. By shifting the context and identity of overlooked materials, she reveals their near-talismanic capacity to bear witness to intimacy, labour and transformation.

This sensibility is captured by scholar Dawn Adès, who writes: ”The world is full of discarded, unloved and broken things. Those objects lucky enough to be gathered by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas are mysteriously coaxed back to life, becoming beautiful through new and unexpected juxtapositions... their original functions absorbed and transformed, the objects now existing independently in worlds of their own.”

For Zagorska-Thomas, authorship is a quiet negotiation with the material. “Because I almost always start with an existing object, I don’t consider myself a proper author of the final work,” she notes. “I’m more a pair of hands helping to bring about its emancipation from daily servitude.” At times she treats objects like fragments of forensic evidence, reading their surfaces for what remains; at others, she allows them to speak again, their stories unfolding somewhere between what they once were and what they are becoming.

Alongside the works in In Absentia, Zagorska-Thomas also welcomes collaboration with audiences through a bespoke commission process. Visitors are invited to bring their own broken or discarded objects—such as shattered glassware, damaged domestic items, or materials carrying personal history—so that the artist can repair, stitch, or reconfigure them into new works. This process extends her ongoing interest in afterlives and transformation: objects that once signified loss or rupture are given renewed presence, entering a different cycle of meaning while retaining the traces of their past.