Abortion ban, 2020
On 22 October 2020, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal ruled that abortion because of severe and irreversible foetal defects was unconstitutional. Those cases were almost all of the legal abortions in the country, so in practice the ruling ended them. What was left: rape, incest, or a threat to the woman’s life or health.
That same evening, women went out on the streets. For weeks, hundreds of thousands of people protested all over Poland, in big cities and small towns, under the red lightning bolt of the All-Poland Women’s Strike. It was the largest protest movement in the country since the fall of communism. The ruling came into force anyway, at the end of January 2021.
This project is what I made around it: sketches, research, the protests, and three posters.
Photo: Silar, Kraków, October 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, resized and cropped; this version is shared under the same licence.
Photo: Silar, Kraków, October 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, resized and cropped; this version is shared under the same licence.
Sketches
Around that time I was putting together a portfolio for the art academy, so I drew constantly: scenes from the protests, portraits, and the female body, which I was studying in life-drawing classes. It was a long process, and much of what came next grew out of it.
Research
Alongside the drawing, I read about women’s rights and their history in Poland, and went looking for Polish women artists. I was struck by how many important names I had never heard of, and by how often women’s art is overlooked, undervalued, or left out of the mainstream story.
I spent the most time with the work of Alicja Żebrowska, Ewa Partum, Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Ewa Kuryluk and Alina Szapocznikow.
Research board: works by the artists named above, collected for study. All rights remain with the artists.
On the streets
It wasn’t only reading and drawing. Protests happened almost every day at that time, and I participated: with a banner in my hand, or with a camera, documenting what was happening. Being there was my own act of resistance.
My own photos, from the protests in Kraków, October–December 2020.
Posters
At the time, I was reading “Piękni XX-wieczni. Polscy projektanci graficy”, edited by Jacek Mrówczyk: a history of 20th-century Polish graphic design, told through 64 designers and their posters, book covers, logos and typefaces. It inspired me, and my posters became a little ode to the old propaganda posters.
Read one after another, they tell the story in one sentence.
For the lettering I used “Strajk” by Michał Berger, a font made from digitised letters of the handwritten banners from those protests.
To this day, one of my favourite projects, and a work I am genuinely proud of.
Polish elections, 2023
On 15 October 2023, after eight years of PiS government, Poland voted again. Turnout was 74%, the highest since 1989, carried largely by women and young people. PiS still won the most votes, but lost its majority, and by the end of the year there was a new government.
Before the vote, I made a series of posters.
Type
A few months earlier, I took a workshop with Vlad Boyko on making custom type with AI. Together, the group made a font that came out really experimental. It runs through the whole series, down to the little PiS stickers, and I loved how punk it looked.
Peace
The rest are word jokes. The ruling party was PiS, which in Polish sounds almost like “peace”. So: “Peace out”, “Peace was never an option”, “I woke up today and chose violence (not peace)”, “Peace may (not) be with you”. The party’s full name is Law and Justice, which is where the last poster comes from.