NADIA LESNIAREK

I am a disabled artist and curator, and my practice revolves around painting, installation, research, and community engagement. My work focuses on architecture in relation to the body, the senses, joy and radical invitations to the chronic subject. I first studied Architecture at Cambridge, where I explored representational and expressive practices in drawing and model making. Through my time at Cambridge I began to understand theory, design and art as tools for radical politics in particular with race, gender and disability. I exhibited my paintings in various group exhibitions throughout the city. I then went on to work at Herzog & de Meuron and then with Amanda Levete on the Royal College of Art Battersea campus and the Eiffel Tower public spaces project respectively. During this time I was invited by Grow Tottenham to exhibit 60 works including paintings and drawings for an exhibition on Intimacy and Power in London. I then worked as a Research Lead at the RCA on place-making, developing engaging methods of communication between towns, decision-makers and experts in light of social isolation and the climate crisis.

I went on to complete my MA at the RCA, studying under Cooking Sections duo Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, focusing on community co-design and retrofit healing practices in urban areas for chronic pain. During this time I worked on Designing Different with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and the Wellcome Collection's collaborative research space, running art and model-making workshops with adults with autism spectrum disorder.

My artistic and curatorial practice has since combined an interest in disability, collaborative making, crip-time and architectural thinking. At The 54 Art Show I exhibited a chronic installation, made in collaboration with Charlie Hawksfield from the Folly Building Workshop. Bed Folly for the Chronic Subject, is a reimagined ‘frame’ for an artwork, a structure integrating a space to lie down below, with a canvas stretched above, painted as a dreamscape of reclining friends. It offers a radical invitation for the chronic subject to fully participate in the exhibition experience whilst relieving symptoms of discomfort or pain. Posing the question, how can we make the clinical acts of pain relief joyful? I was then commissioned to write a piece on the artwork for the Resting Up Collective, a publication by chronically ill and disabled people.

I developed my interest in interdisciplinary organising and curating through The 54 Art Show where I gathered 18 different artists crossing 15 different art disciplines including: painting, drawing, video installation, glass sculpture, wood carving, plaster casting, illustration, photography, sound, embroidery, poetry and song.

I went on to exhibit with the Camberwell Kabinett Collective. My show on Maintenance Tools of Body and City was an installation including an architectural structure, paintings and sculptures, which gathered and replenished representations of useful objects in a site of restoration. The project opens up conversations around use, value, and the ritual objects and the processes of care. As part of the exhibition I led art workshops on care and maintenance practices with older people at Southwark’s Age UK Healthy Living and Learning Centre and an online workshop with the Crip, chronically ill and disabled community.