Dariusz Works Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom
A multidisciplinary artist based in Scotland - printmaking, painting, mixed media, digital, ... Join me on my journey through time and space and uncover the power of creativity and looking for answers, which permeate both my approach to art and life itself.
My artistic practice is about answering questions that I am still trying to ask. Why am I doing this? It is a lifelong exploration, asking questions and looking for some answers. These are driven by curiosity and a perpetual nature of feedback loops that are everywhere around us.
I am continuing on from the path I have been on for a while. There’s this feeling in me I cannot shake off. It is some yearning for an unspecified something. It is unspecified, as I cannot really tell if it is a place, a person, a thing, or something else altogether. I don’t know that yet, but it seems there’s been some progress.
People might call it nostalgia - but without going into the psychology of nostalgia just yet, I am looking at it from a different perspective first: my lens and the lenses of Svetlana Boym, whose extensive work with this subject has been helping me to see nostalgia from a different angle.
I was brought up in a country whose history is rather hard to leave behind - as it perhaps is the case for any other place on this planet. This had definitely shaped my initial views of what nostalgia meant to me. I can still remember (and sometimes encounter) people who say that the world in the past was a better place, and they’d be happy to return to the old ways of how things used to be. As a naïve child, I had very little understanding of the world around me. Looking back, I know I do not want things to be the way they used to be. Getting back to the past is futile. Boym’s had written about at least two types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective.
Restorative nostalgia focuses on reconstructing the lost home or idealised past, often linked with collective memory and national identity. It is about restoring the “good old days” and is often uncritical or even revisionist in its approach.
Reflective nostalgia dwells on longing and loss, accepting that the past cannot be recreated. It is more individual, personal, and critically engages with history, acknowledging the impossibility of returning to the past.
This simple conceptual framework helps me understand what my kind of nostalgia really is about. It is the first step. I can certainly say that I do not subscribe to restorative nostalgia. The more I know about the past, the more critical I am about it, and I am also very aware that there is no point in going back. What is worth doing, however, is learning from the past and the mistakes that have been made (along with some of the good things that come from the past).
I can see that many subjects and interests that I have can be gathered around this reflective nostalgia. It is almost like I am making it up as I go, but that’s what my path is about: learning new things, often through chance and difficulty, and unlearning and discarding what is not serving me in my journey. I keep reminding myself that the destination is not the point here. I have no crystal ball, and I am not interested in predicting the future (seeing beyond the horizon).
