Jolanta Dolewska’s new body of work, Overthrows, presents a range of poetic, philosophical and political engagements with intimacy and its ambivalences. These engagements are mapped onto and explored through the practice of Jiu-Jitsu (which the artist herself was engaged with for a while). Dolewska provides some context for understanding how Overthrows
developed from my thinking about physical interaction. I was fascinated by the Jiu-Jitsu movement and the ambiguity of different tackles and how different bodies engage, and in order to overpower somebody you had to get quite close, rather than in other martial arts where you use strokes, pushing away or punching.
Extending and elaborating into new directions Dolewska’s deeply sculptural practice and aesthetic, evident in her previous photographic and filmic works such as In this Hollow Valley (2019), Before we Seek (2021), Fewer I: 8,417 Cells (2021), and Without Apparatus (2022), Overthrows consists of discrete yet interlinked bodies of work across different tactile and visual media: soft sculptures, film, clay head-objects, and photography. Each offers a distinct approach to the shared thematic concern with the ambiguities of touch and contact, and each engages in different ways with the ambivalent potentials of touch as the moment of contact between bodies and surfaces.
Dolewska finds key elements of her concern with the sculptural expressed in the art of Jiu Jitsu itself, with its stylized and codified movements and regulations, its named procedures of contact and engagement between two competing bodies, and its reliance on the physical laws of weight and mass in relation to form and agility:
When I started practicing, there was something very sculptural and physical about those movements and particularly when two bodies got together. They would become these kinds of creatures, like four-legged ones. When they start rolling, they become one. […] How surreal and beautiful the structure and engagement of people is in these moments!
One element of Overthrows consists of five soft sculptural figures which Dolewska refers to as ‘embodiers’, “because they simulate being human. I designed them from my own body, but then I started to play with different shapes.” Modelled initially on the artist as corporeal prototype, their heads and extremities are missing, suggesting a kind of curtailed, incomplete corporeality from which key organs of agency and identity have been removed. Present in their human-sized forms, their shapes are idiosyncratic – ranging from four-legged, armless, or one-legged dummies to a conspicuously rounded (in Dolewska’s words ‘pregnant’) torso – a variety of shapes which strangely humanizes and deliberately engenders these otherwise anonymized figures.
This tension between the qualities of anonymity and identity, object and subject, is also evident in Dolewska’s initial prototype of the ‘embodiers’, a small figurine. Its unevenly sawn body is made of felt, its fuzzy texture giving it a distinctly haptic quality, while its head is made of an old, brittle rubber band dangerously on the edge of snapping. These qualities of inviting tactility and threatening fragility create a being which is both not quite fully formed, yet already seemingly beyond repair, both in becoming and at the limit of that becoming, an object apparently demanding different responsibilities of care. In a photograph by Dolewska of the figure turned away from the viewer, these qualities of vulnerability transform into a meditation on intimacy and questions about how to look, how to encounter the figurine, raising questions of the viewer’s intimate and emotional relation to the suggestively inanimate object.
Overthrows is a profound study of the kinds of intimacy provoked or stimulated by such aesthetic encounters. Intimacy, indeed, and its expression or resistance via the complex, Jiu-Jitsu-informed procedures and manoeuvres of touching, embracing, grappling, struggling, and overthrowing, can be understood as the medium linking the disparate elements of the oeuvre in a subtle and sometimes disturbing dynamic of proximity, of close and implicitly intrusive contact which is simultaneously playful and competitive, affectionate and aggressive. Discussing Jiu Jitsu, Dolewska states: “[…] There is a level of intimacy – it is a level where you get two people very close. And when you play-fight you also never go beyond a level where you would hurt someone, so there is a lot of trust in practicing.”
In the filmic element of Overthrows, the ‘embodiers’ encounter three Jiu Jitsu practitioners performing various moves on them. Through close-ups, blurred views, movements and pauses on moments of stand-still in the fight or the stumps of limbs, or quietly capturing the full scene of the engaged pair, the camera observes the intimacies of the fights. Ironically introducing the sense of a competition towards an object or victory, Dolewska calls them “grapplings”, locating in the different moves, touches, and squeezes, a process of testing of the material endurance of the ‘embodiers’. Grappling involves also the exploration of tensions and transgression of indiscernible but evident and crucial boundaries of intimate contact – for example that between embrace and choking: as Dolewska notes, “There was an ambiguity between the hug and the choke.” This ambiguity affirms the concern of Overthrows with exploring the often problematic intimacies of human relations, and more specifically examining questions around the violent and intimidating intimacies suffered by many women. This aspect of the work introduces a social and political context informed by Dolewska’s previous experience of working in women’s refuge and homelessness hostels.
This feminist concern threads through Overthrows. It’s already evident in the work’s basis in Jiu-Jitsu, which was a key element of early 20th century Suffragette activism in the UK and the US, learnt by women as a practice of self-defense against the police and as a ‘husband-tamer.’ Dolewska’s sculptural deployment of not-quite-fully-formed and differently-formed figures and bodies can be located within a long-tradition of feminist and surrealist practices of figure-making to explore a range of traumata, from the personal to the historical, through the testing, twisting, and extending of the boundaries of the human form. This tradition is evident in Dorothea Tanning’s soft sculptures, Hans Bellmer’s La Poupée works, Ithell Colquhoun’s painterly fusions between bodies and natural objects, Magdalena Abakanowicz’s woven fibre sculptures, and Louis Bourgeois’s later fabric works. Overthrows builds on this tradition by offering a range of engagements in relation to patriarchal power and the possibilities of women’s endurance, response, and empowerment – all versions of the physical and political possibilities explored in Overthrows.
Five life-sized, featureless clay heads (again modelled on Dolewska’s own) present a further component of Overthrows. Like the ‘embodiers’, they exist somewhere between the not-yet-formed and the complete; they exist as self-contained entities which simultaneously suggest and resist being completing parts to the headless ‘embodiers’. The heads evoke mythical traditions and narratives of human creation from clay, evident in the Qur’an and the Jewish folklore of the golem, or the Biblical Genesis in which god “formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”. This is a recurring theme in Dolewska œuvre, explicitly addressed in her earlier work Breathless from 2016/17, where clay vessels were created by blowing air into them to the point where they would be about to burst, again testing and exploring the boundaries of material endurance.
This endurance is also tested in the five clay heads. Their surfaces bear conspicuous indentations emerging from the artist’s performing of Jiu-Jitsu moves on them whilst the clay was still impressionable – fingerprints, imprints of the Gi worn in training, a cheek flattened from being pressed onto a mat, a squashed neck resulting from a choking move. These traces of touch offer a metaphorical exploration of human vulnerability and endurance. Dolewska comments of the heads: “I wanted to show their fragility as it is a human fragility.” A key aspect of this fragility insistently suggests the maternal, an important association which is evident in various moments of all the elements of Overthrows as an integrally insistent dimension of the work, from the apparently-pregnant ‘embodier’ to the bare, unformed heads, gently bedded in one photograph on crinkled white sheets, the evident malleability of the clay recalling the delicate and vulnerable soft skull structure of newborn babies, before the bone hardens to protect the brain.
In combination, the different, distinct components of Overthrows offer a complex study of the subtle interpersonal politics and emotional complexities surrounding intimacy. Deeply embedded in the poetic, the intimate sits here within various entities and their interrelations of movement, contact, interconnection. It is located within the objects, in their conjuring of near- and yet not quite-human qualities, and their relation to themselves and among themselves, the Jiu Jitsu practitioners, the artist, the filmic and photographic recording mechanisms of mediation, and the viewer. Overthrows tests and examines the borders of intimacy, and its situatedness within temporal and spatial proximity and distance. The work insistently asks of the viewer, what is too close? – and what is too far?
Patricia Allmer, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Edinburgh