companion by Bogna Luiza Wisniewska, at SIC, Helsinki, 13/12/2025 – 25/01/2026.
“I want to be as good a companion as marigolds are…”
Is it the body beside us, the echo of a gesture, the branching shape of a root?
Today, we’re speaking about companion by Bogna Luiza Wisniewska.
As we moved through this exhibition, we allowed ourselves to be guided by small presences, a withering flower, a frog gazing at the moon, a forgotten glove, a potato sprouting in the dark.
From the very first images, the show unfolds like a quiet garden.
There’s no forced path, only a spacious, almost shy arrangement that invites us to slow down. The works are placed with care and distance, like plants growing freely. The raw, luminous gallery space becomes a neutral ground for a visual ecosystem composed of painting, ceramics, textiles, engraved wood, and ephemeral installations.
Wisniewska works with a material sensitivity that is also poetic.
Her paintings, with deep blues and earthy browns, tell stories of vegetal cycles through gentle humor and a rooted ecological awareness. In one, a frog sits patiently before a marigold under a smiling sun. In another, a potato sprouts violet shoots, like a creature dreaming its way into wakefulness. Each subject is simple, yet charged with quiet symbolism.
Her ceramic works, hands, feet, animal forms, fragmented or hybrid bodies, speak softly to the surfaces around them.
They rest on windowsills, hang on iron bars, nestle at the base of walls. Not ornaments, but watchful presences. The hands seem to have just planted or just gathered. The feet, rooted to the floor like human rhizomes, suggest a continuity between body and earth.
One piece stays with us, a delicate metal frame in the center of the room, like a garden arch. Suspended on it, a small painting, an open hand holding a pea pod. The gesture is one of offering, of trust. An invitation to notice the essential and relational in the everyday, an herb, a leaf, a seed.
Wisniewska’s use of alternative supports, like the pyrography panel etched with sagging marigolds, reveals an attention to line and gesture bordering on ritual.
Simple materials, plywood, terracotta, are handled without hierarchy, making everything part of a shared ecosystem, human, vegetal, emotional.
What remains is not a single image, but an atmosphere,
The humility of garden plants, the oddity of their companions, frogs, hands, tubers, the possibility of a kind of intimacy that emerges from the ground, from care, from slowness.
companion is not a show to rush through.
It’s one to accompany, and to be accompanied by.
-FW
