Fire, Home, Rooms

They don’t necessarily involve loss but when they do, they make you think about what you have from a different perspective. Gajewszky believes there are more than one events like this during one’s lifetime. Even if you didn’t realise it at the time, it becomes clear in retrospect that it was the moment that your life has started to change.

For her, it came in the form of a fire. A fire that had brought the reality of dying closer to home. A fire that physically destroyed her entire childhood, leaving only memories of her own to remember. When you suddenly lose most of your possessions, you start to feel an emptiness which is very hard to fill. You try to collect and connect the remaining parts of what you still have.

Through her room collages she has started to recreate the places which only exists in her head, the rooms of emptiness, sadness, fears, and anxiety. The collages are based on different rooms she has physically lived in since the fire, but they felt empty, scary, and foreign to her. In these parallel-reality rooms nothing feels safe or homelike, yet they are her actual home spaces. She creates these “fantasy” or vision rooms to show how reality can be replaced by your own fears, thoughts and recurring nightmares. The feelings of emptiness and fear don’t have to be connected to reality, and memories can rewrite the way you manage to live your life.