Antonina Gugała: Running to the Sun

We don’t see anyone we know in the park, and we are completely alone in the playground. On this day, even the usually busy street is empty. The external world exists, but without greater meaning. We are together—in a cocoon, a den, on a cloud, on an island—distanced from others, enclosed within our circle.

An expectant mother finds herself out of sight, out of mind during the pandemic; with eyes tightly shut throughout labor; seeking contact with an infant’s gaze and trying out a toddler’s underfoot line of vision; and straining to keep both in sight on expeditions to the playgrounds and museums of Warsaw. Apertures of nurturing.

In her autobiographical photobook Running to the Sun, artist Antonina Gugała weaves images of moments in time paced to the clock of parenting (an alternately hustling or stalling mechanism) with capsular prose texts detailing motherhood envisioned and navigated through various forms of isolation and societal rupture. And all while molding an evolving identity as artist-researcher and mother-of-two attempting to balance generative practices of creation and caregiving.