GreenPoint EARTH 2020 Screens Award Winner Highlight: Aga Siwczyk

In the lead up to the one year anniversary of GreenPoint EARTH 2020: Screens2Streets, we decided to catch up with Aga Siwczyk, one of our ten ‘Screens Awards’ winners. Read on to learn more about Aga, a surrealist artist from Poland, and discover what inspires her unusual creatures and unique paintings.

Our virtual Screens2Streets global arts activation and juried competition gave artists the opportunity to harness the incredible power of art to illuminate climate change solutions, raise awareness about climate-related issues, and inspire the world to build back environmentally smarter and healthier communities.

More than 100 artist submissions were received from a diverse mix of artists representing nearly 30 countries across the globe, from which our judging committee selected 10 Screens Awards to receive a financial prize and visibility of their work.

The GreenPoint EARTH 2020: Screens2Streets ‘Screens Awards’ were presented in collaboration with The Climate Group and UN SDG Action Campaign during Climate Week NYC and the SDG Action Zone in connection to the 75TH Anniversary of the United Nations and the 5th Anniversary of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background in art?

AGA: I’m a painter attracted by surrealism and all forms of art that tell stories. I live in Warsaw, Poland. I graduated from Art High School, studied Art Education at the University of Silesia, and have completed my master’s degree in Film and Media Arts from the Jagiellonian University. I’ve worked as an Art Director in several advertising agencies, but my passion for painting, having a tactile contact with brush, real paints and canvas, creating an object that is one-of-a-kind that can open people up about important matters, has never let me go. I like to work with traditional methods while bringing modern/futuristic/technical subjects. I love contradictions. They’re the turning points, when things are starting to get interesting.

We love how your art explores the connection between nature and the artificial world. What is the inspiration behind this?

AGA: Thank you very much. I’m interested in blending nature and the technical world, which is a particularity of our reality. For example, we often escape from the over-industrialized daily life to nature in the mountains or by the sea, and we do so by our fossil fuel-powered cars. We say we do it to “charge our batteries”. And in this wilderness, we leave products made by our factories, which lie now on the grass and become a part of the landscape. I look for such places of connection and ask myself the sci-fi question: "what if". So, I create creatures from the leftover parts of the technical world and wonder how they might function in nature.

The series I’m painting is called “Pareidolias”. Pareidolia is a phenomenon of noticing forms in everyday objects (i.e. a face seen in a cloud or animal shape spotted in a mud splatter). It comes from a human tendency to seek patterns in random information. In pareidolia, I seek patterns of natural-artificial correlations.

As one of our 10 ‘Screens’ Award winners of the 2020 edition of GreenPoint EARTH Screens2Streets, what made you want to take part in this competition?

AGA: Through my works, I want to tell people about the impact of our technology on nature, recycling inefficiency, animal treatment issues and how climate change affects our reality.

After spending years in advertising agencies, promoting unnecessary and redundant products, I turned my focus towards working with companies that don’t add up to the litter mass production and to art that is able to reach people about things that concern us all. With this state of mind, I’m searching for places and collaborations with similar goals.

I appreciate the work that GreenPoint EARTH does to create engaging artworks that are also environmentally conscious through their collaborations with artists and organisations that are dedicated to making a difference. I was very glad to be able to take part in Screens2Streets, especially during such an important event as Climate Week NYC.

Your winning submission featured a swan made from discarded materials and plastic. Can you explain the meaning behind the painting?

AGA: My pareidolias often show surrealistic, illogical animals. One example is ‘Swan’, created by accident from a plastic bag entangled around the bike’s handlebar. The creature is temporary, but vibrant and won't decompose for 400 years.

I wanted to paint it after viewing a photo documentation of seashores swamped with litter.
Here, there’s a pareidolia of nature: a resemblance of a real bird and resemblance of lake flora. Represented by all those purposeless objects we once have produced and paid for.

What are your creative plans for the future?

AGA: After a short break due to the pandemic, which turned my life upside down, I’m coming back to work with a doubled force. I’m painting a new series of pareidolia birds for my solo exhibition in 2022 in the UK. I also continually look for opportunities to speak about nature and climate changes through various visual channels, so you may see more of my creatures in the future 😊