Artist Statement
My work begins with the experience of living ‘in between’ places – between the country I left and the country I now call home, between family history and lived memory, and between what is remembered and what disappears. Born in Poland and now based in Australia, I am interested in what we carry with us across distance and generations. Family photographs, landscapes, domestic objects and fragments of personal history are ways of exploring migration, inherited memory, loss and the continual reconstruction of identity.
Photography allows me to return to things that can no longer be physically reached. I work across analogue and digital photography, cyanotype, textiles and installation, often using archival photographs and found materials. Through processes of layering, repetition, concealment and reconstruction, I consider how images can retain the memory of people and places while also revealing the gaps, distortions and absences within memory.
At the centre of the work is a question I continue to return to: what remains with us when people, places and earlier versions of ourselves are no longer within reach?
Short Bio
Aldona Kmieć (pronounced “KM-yetch”) is a Polish-Australian visual artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, working across photography, cyanotype, textiles, installation and archival practice.
Born in Poland and migrating to Australia in 2009, her work draws on personal and collective histories shaped by migration, inherited memory and place. Her practice moves between conceptual and documentary approaches, often bringing archival photographs into dialogue with contemporary landscapes, domestic objects and material processes.
Kmieć holds an Advanced Diploma in Photography from London Metropolitan University. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in public, institutional and private collections including the State Library of Victoria, St John of God Hospitals, Ballarat Arts Foundation and the Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka.
She maintains a studio at Montsalvat Arts Centre in Eltham, Melbourne, where she develops new work and teaches analogue photographic cyanotype techniques.
