Intremities: Kasia Tons

Intremities brings together selected works by Kasia Tons that span the last six years of her textile-based practice. Creating two and three-dimensional forms from reclaimed and natural materials, Kasia’s artmaking acts as both an escape from reality and a way to make sense of it.

Central to Intremities is the artist’s most recent and monumental work, Panopoly, a culmination of over a decade of research, experimentation and lived experience in self-sufficiency and nonconventional dwellings to create her ‘disaster dream shelter’. Housing displacement and impermanence have long been concerns for Kasia, as evidenced in works such as It is morning and we are here 1, Tarp diary and If I were a street, where the artist documents a restlessness in both transient and more settled ways of living.

Explorations of the private and the communal are also recurrent. From personal examinations in Beyond Homeostasis and We will sit, we will wait (and soon our wounds will be clean), to documenting individual and collective histories as a way to redefine societal futures in She is the Spirit of the doorway leading out, After and Symbiocene Blanket, Kasia’s work considers the internal and external, the physical and emotional spaces in which we dwell to determine the infrastructure that needs to be built, and what might be torn down and repurposed.

If extremities are the farthest or outermost points, then Intremities brings more than a decade of fringe dwelling back to the heart of where we are as a society, in the here and now. It implores us to look inwards and outwards to question the ways we exist in the world, as this is what ultimately determines our future.

– Marie Falcinella