Paulina Hojka makes portraits out of fabric scraps, and the faces in them are mostly missing.
She cuts and layers textiles that were on their way to an incinerator, and out of them builds recognisable people. Not photographic likeness, not painted detail. A head shape, a hairline, the particular way somebody holds their hands. And yet the people who commission these portraits look at them and say, that is me.
We wrote to her because her work is an experiment nobody had run before.
If you remove the eyes, the nose and the mouth, what is left of a person that still reads as them? Fashion, photography and medicine all assume the face is where identity lives. Paulina Hojka quietly disagrees, and has the finished pieces to prove it.
What follows is her own account, lightly edited, in her words.
The technique is not the interesting part. The interesting part is which corrections people ask for once the portrait is finished, and what those requests say about how they see themselves.
You make portraits from materials, not paint. What can fabric do to a face that a brush cannot?
I will answer this a little perversely. It is not about what fabric can do, it is about what it cannot. It cannot be too small or it falls apart. It does not allow certain details. At some scale you could probably attempt chiaroscuro, but not at the scale I work in.
For me all those limitations are freeing in a way. They force creative thinking, they force me to look for other solutions, like giving up on a detailed rendering of the face, like letting go of hyperrealism.
And on the other side, fabric is an invitation to play with structure and texture, which adds its own value to the picture.
Your portraits are heavily simplified, and people still recognise themselves in them. What has to stay for somebody to say "that is me", and what can be thrown out without loss?
As I mentioned, I removed the faces from my portraits. Our brains have a fascinating ability to fill in what is missing, or to reorder things, the way they do with scrambled or omitted letters in a text. The same thing happens in a portrait.
What matters then is the shape of the head, the line of the face and the hair. That is also why I do not like working from selfies, because the likeness is harder to catch.
And my portraits are not only faces, often they are whole figures, and there gestures play an enormous role. I always try to catch some characteristic arrangement of the hands from the photographs, the way a couple stands next to each other, and to carry that into the portrait. It adds to the likeness.
Then the last element, clothing. If I dress somebody in a shirt when they neither like nor wear shirts, how can they be themselves in that picture? That is why I do not judge and do not invent, I just follow the people I am portraying with curiosity.
Your bio has a line about living low waste without the hair shirt. Where does the belief come from that responsibility has to look modest, or even ugly?
My hair shirt is perhaps not even about looking a certain way, it is about denying yourself. In shorthand: I deny myself something, I suffer, I do penance, I punish myself.
But it is not true that we have to have whatever we happen to want, now, immediately, or that we have to have it at all. The problem is that the world keeps insisting: go on, buy it, you deserve it, you have earned it, treat yourself.
And I would add one more brick to that. Not owning something reads as poverty, and nobody wants to be poor or to look poor. Whereas if a person can afford it, they can have whatever they desire.
I think our task is to change that thinking, to show that you can be happy while buying less, choosing clothes, furniture and other necessary things secondhand, giving them a second life and limiting the production of new ones. And that this can look good, and even if it looked modest, there is nothing wrong with that and you can still enjoy your life. Something is penance only when we decide it is, so perhaps it is enough to stop.
You teach collage. What most often blocks adults when they have to make somebody’s portrait with their own hands?
I think what blocks adults most often is the fear of failure. "It will not work out for me", "I will ruin it", "I have two left hands", "I will not make it as nicely as you".
Luckily I have a few ways around those blocks. The first, and it is liberating, is that these are only waste materials that were going to the incinerator anyway, so at worst they end up there, nothing terrible happens, and meanwhile you get to try and experiment.
The second thing I do is support them. I help with the drawing, because a good base makes it easy to carry on. I advise which material to take and how to cut it. I ask questions, and I try not to interfere, so that everybody has a chance to express themselves.
When people order a portrait, they have a particular version of themselves in mind. Do they ask for changes that have nothing to do with art and everything to do with some insecurity?
Oh, definitely. Corrections to portraits very rarely have anything to do with art. People have a vision of themselves or of their friends in their heads.
Sometimes we genuinely discuss colour and structure, but very often I am slimming people down. Because an oversized garment makes them look bigger, because somebody simply wants it that way even though I cut the shape exactly from the photograph. I have made calves more muscular for one husband, I have enlarged lips, I have taken the grey out of hair.
But I also respect all those corrections, because I am making the work for those people and they are the ones who will look at the portrait every day.
A commissioned portrait costs time and money at a moment when a phone takes a photograph for free. What are people actually buying?
I think people are buying singularity, uniqueness, importance. Making a portrait is a process. At the beginning we always talk, and the client chooses the photographs.
We all have many photographs and we rarely print them any more, so choosing the ones for a portrait becomes a journey through important moments and memories. It pushes you to think about what you want to look at every day on your wall, what you want to commemorate, how you want to feel looking at it.
The second important thing is the conversation, because I ask about favourite colours, clothes, all sorts of details we sometimes do not focus on. If we are making a portrait for ourselves, it is a chance to take a good look at yourself. If it is for somebody else, it is an invitation to focus on that person, to think about their needs. And then that portrait says to them, I know you, you matter to me.
Have you ever made a self portrait? If so, was it easier or harder than working on a stranger?
I have, it is even my profile picture. I treated it as play, as an exercise, so it was probably like any other portrait.
But I think that if I had carried the pressure of making my one definitive self portrait for the years ahead, it would have been harder, because I would have analysed too much and the nerves would simply have eaten me. Pressure is not good for creative work, or for life’s challenges in general.
Our three conclusions, the ones that stay with us after this conversation.
First, that identity survives the loss of the face. The head, the hairline and the way somebody stands carry more of a person than we assume, which suggests that appearance is a whole silhouette rather than a set of features to be corrected one by one. Second, that when people are handed control over their own image, they reach for the insecurity before they reach for the art, and they do it consistently enough that a portraitist can predict it. And third, that the fear of looking modest is really a fear of looking poor, which is a different problem from the one people think they are having.
Paulina Hojka works in Poland, making fabric portraits to commission and teaching collage: instagram.com/paulina.hojka