This post from the series “Boleslawiec artistic community” was prepared within the framework of the project “Boleslawiec – 30 years of local government” implemented by the Museum of Ceramics and the Boleslawiec Cultural Center – International Ceramics Center
Katarzyna Rott was born and raised in Bolesławiec. After her studies, she emigrated to the United Kingdom, from where she returns to Poland on the occasion of various artistic projects. She is a glass artist (Secondary School of Fine Arts in Jelenia Góra), photographer (Secondary Vocational School – S. Wyspiański School of Artistic Crafts in Jelenia Góra) and art teacher (University of Arts in Poznań), but she creates in many different techniques. She is a co-founder of the creative team Silverclock, and since 2011 she has also run an art studio under this name, previously functioning as a photographic studio. There are five main areas of interest in her work:
Costume Design
In the UK, she made bespoke costumes for the gothic music festival in Whitby and the steampunk festival in Lincoln. In Poland, she has designed and made costumes for role-playing game conventions, as well as imaginative theatre (LARP).
In September 2013, she started working with the Grand Theatre – National Opera in Warsaw. First, as an assistant costume designer, she participated in the preparation of the staging of the comic ballet “Don Quixote” by Ludwig Alois Minkus. In February 2015, she made her debut on the chamber stage with the costumes for the ballet show ” Pupa” based on the works of Witold Gombrowicz, which also used animations by her.
Other significant challenges included designing costumes for productions for the youngest audiences: the show ” Calliya” based on Hans Christian Andersen and the ballet “Carnival of the Animals” with music by Camille Saint-Saëns. From November 2020, she is working on the costumes for the new ballet production ” Don Quixote” for the Castle Opera in Szczecin. This is the most complex project in terms of character and number of costumes in her career to date.
The costumes for the performances designed by Katarzyna Rott are largely based on the idea of dressing the “bodies in the flesh” in a simple and completely transformative way, without restricting the dancers and acrobats’ freedom of movement. Their characteristic feature is the painterly treatment of materials, which are decorated by hand or using specially designed printed patterns.
Illustration and related arts
In parallel to costume design, she is involved in creating illustrations for art books, including the collection of fairy tales “The Fish That Became a Bird”. She has also developed the visual concept for the fantasy novel ” The Iron Bear and the Treading Cat in Search of the Silver Clock”, which she co-authored.
In addition, the artist is involved in lettering in the fullest sense of the word, graphic design, where – as in the case of illustration – she combines traditional and digital techniques. The means of expression she uses determine the final shape and style of her works as much as their subject matter.
Leatherwork
Oil painting on canvas
In this traditional technique, the artist has been creating since 2006. Since then, she has been working on two coexisting and interpenetrating series: “Architectural” and “The other side of the mirror”. The ever-growing collection of paintings includes canvases ranging in size from tiny (20 x 15 cm) to gigantic (triptych 210 x 510 cm).
They are all “afterimages of the imagination”. It is a hybrid of semi-abstraction, surrealism and synthetic cubism, which may allude to real forms, although not necessarily. The most important thing is the structure, the guiding colour tonality, the multi-faceted angles of vision, the simplified forms on a flat, heavy background. It is an attempt to capture a vast, ever-changing space that visualises itself through the broken structure of architectural forms.
Engraving on glass
She began her adventure with this colourless material when she was still at art high school. It was one of the things she had to learn as part of the core curriculum. However, it did not end with just doing a few tasks in practical classes, but developed into a technique that she perfected over a long period of time on hundreds of objects.
Over time, her greatest passion became free-hand engraving – no sketch, no stencil, just a seed of an idea – the art of hand-drawn glass ritual, the main idea of which is the line that creates a milky-transparent world, full of linear creations, dragon fish and spatial forms, conjured up on the surface of a glass or mirror.
We invite you to take a closer look at the work of Katarzyna Rott and the Silverclock team
Silverclock
Silverclock Art