A year earlier, with the help of photographer Roman Cieślewicz, she documented twenty pieces of chewing gum she had chewed herself. Displayed on stone blocks, these expressive self-casts made from such an unusual, “low” material, though remaining somewhat on the margins of her oeuvre, stand as one of the most modest yet paradoxically strongest and most intimate manifestos of an artist who boldly flirted not only with photography but above all with design.

It was the body that led Filomena Smoła (b. 1999) to art, and then to crossing its boundaries with works that – though sculptural – can be used: held to the lips or worn on the hand. “Since childhood I have needed strong impulses, constant stimulation to better understand them, to know where my limits were, where hunger began and where excess set in. Movement and touch taught my body awareness".

From painting – or more precisely, action painting – she moved on to glass. In the United States, where she emigrated to work in a glassworks in the spirit of the American Studio Glass Movement, in spaces heated to forty degrees Celsius, fueled by constant adrenaline, in a “dance” with the blowpipe carrying semi-liquid mass, she experienced complete integration with herself and with the material. She became one of the few female glassblowers who drive form not only with gesture but with their own breath.

Today, in her works, she processes memories, reworks and reinterprets past domestic landscapes; she evokes close relationships, the memory of people and places that no longer exist but which she defines as the foundations of language – and more broadly, of identity. In fragile, delicate matter she confesses longing, but also searches for harmony and balance; she inscribes lessons about mindful presence in the “here and now,” and tames the loss encoded in glass: “I am interested in beauty that does not avoid loss, but accepts it and becomes part of it. For me, it is not an abstract ideal, but something deeply rooted in everyday life”, says Filomena Smoła.

The exhibition When Beauty Burns is a meeting of artists distant in generation yet profoundly close – creators who speak in a distinctly feminine voice and who have made their own bodies instruments of artistic expression. Their objects are intimate keepsakes of contact with the medium, sensual experiences that engage the viewer. Both Szapocznikow and Smoła, starting from the ephemerality of matter, transport it into another, existential dimension – one in which being is inseparably intertwined with transience.