Dorota Kos was born in Gdansk in 1974. She is a graduate of the State Art Secondary School in Gdynia-Orlowo. After graduating, she took up studies in the Sculpture Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, which she completed with a graduation work under the direction of Prof. Franciszek Duszenko. Dorota’s achievements include her presence at exhibitions and shows spanning very diverse fields: sculpture, photography, jewellery, design, collaborations with fashion designers. She is a member of the Board of the International Amber Association and a member of the Goldsmithing Artists’ Association (STFZ).
It is common for the history of art to group artists according to styles. Will this be possible in the future regarding our contemporary artists? Time will tell. And yet, more and more often we encounter the term ‘individual style,’ which is not easily pigeonholed. This seems to be the case with Dorota Kos. To use a term borrowed from linguistics, we can say that she has a recognisable idiolect. At first glance, the relationship running through her work – jewellery, sculpture and installations – is difficult to sense, and if so, we sense it rather intuitively. However, a more in-depth view, as well as a conversation with the artist shows a clear cohesion to her work.
It is plants that are the bridge between an installation made of enormous plaster grains, organic forms made of plaster, fabric, paper and the irregular surface of the Amber Board, or jewellery with simple, geometric forms. Plants fascinate Dorota and permeate her thoughts, philosophy and imagination. An installation in which hand-printed and bound books are overgrown with the roots of beans planted in them is almost a self-portrait. Jokingly, I’d say that Dorota Kos treats plants with a ‘Mondrianic Piety,’ because her precise amber and wood compositions, in which she respectfully uses even the tiniest pieces of her plant materials, are very reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s painting.
The artist herself puts it this way, “For many people, plants are a passive component of the landscape, a backdrop to the animals that live in it. They think plants are only there to be exploited as raw material. My work is an attempt to look into the very diverse world of green plants. Their life goes on at a different speed from ours and perhaps this is why we forget that they are living organisms, similar to ourselves. Just like us, although in their own way, they can see, count, communicate with each other, they are sensitive to the slightest touch and can tell time with uncanny precision. Humankind shares its fate with nature, it is subject to the cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth. The dead return to the lap of Mother Earth in hope of sharing the fate of a sown seed. Burial in the embryonic position, common among many archaic cultures, means hope for rebirth. (...) Holy time is a cyclical time.”
This is how we can understand Dorota’s fascination with amber. For her, the resin of trees, once alive and green, and now with parts of other plants inside it, transformed into a beautiful, sunny stone, with many a myth associated with it, is a trace of the existence of this holy, cyclical time.
