Sylwia Gustyn is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Poland, she spent her early years
in Windsor, Ont. where she began exhibiting her paintings at local galleries and lounges.
Finding her way to the Comox Valley 25 years ago, Sylwia obtained a Graphic Design diploma
from NIC and completed a Bachelor’s Degree at Emily Carr, NIC campus, receiving the
Governor General’s Academic Medal. Her work often explores liminal spaces and oscillates
between stark minimalism and chaotic overlays of textures and colours. The artist’s
philosophy is informed by world history, sciences, the occult, and mythology, and is woven into
a rich tapestry of narratives that are then distilled into writings and simple images or symbols
which are left to “air out” atop the painterly abstracted scapes.

The pieces are allowed to morph with time, some are used many times over again and span
whole decades. Each action is a response to the one previous, a transformation and then
reincorporation, speaking to the liminality of identity and the impermanence of things. With
each new visitation the works acquire new significance – they become living records of the
passage of time where the goal is to simultaneously see the static that is in constant flux, and
also weigh it down or collapse it with meaning. The result can be anything from the most
austere and minimalist meditations on negative space – when and if the work is allowed to
remain in one state, or colourful pieces reminiscent of graffiti walls and flow of consciousness
doodles.

The point of the art is not so much to arrive at a destination or a final piece, but to process the
incoming information and allow the work to act as a medium for the transmutation of
knowledge. It is a synthesis of art and ritual, the artist simply a migrant in a space transitional
and marginal, grasping to record fleeting bits of insight.