kalina.banka@gmail.com +48 515 455 717
ABOUT ME

Born in 1989 in Dąbrowa Górnicza. She graduated from the Faculty of Ceramics and Glass at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, where she currently runs the diploma studio at the Department of Glass. In 2020, she received her doctoral degree. She is currently the Head of the Department of Glass. She has held twelve solo exhibitions and participated in several hundred glass exhibitions both in Poland and abroad (including the USA, Italy, Denmark, Switzerland, Ireland, Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia, the Netherlands, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic). She is a laureate of numerous national and international competitions in the field of glass and design.

In 2016, one of her glass works was selected for New Glass Review 38 – a survey of 100 glass works of 2016 organized by the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. In recent years, she has conducted original glass courses at prestigious institutions such as Urban Glass in New York, Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood (USA), and Bild-Werk Frauenau in Germany. Her works are included in the collections of the Karkonosze Museum in Jelenia Góra, the National Museum in Kraków, the Glass Museum Alter Hof Herding in Germany, as well as in several private collections in Poland and abroad.

STATEMENT

She creates unique glass collages, objects and installation. In her glassworks, she deals with important and current themes of emptiness and accumulation, referring to social and economic phenomena. She also turns attention to enviromental degradation caused by industry and excessive consumerism fuels by the world of advertising, social media, fashion and trends. She often combine of traditional techniques with the modern style of her graphics, merging the past and the present. 

Moving seamlessly from commenting on the global reality to private narration, She ventures to embark on a very private and sentimental project connected with her grandmother compulsive hoarding. She tells about the fleeting matter of the physical world as well as psychosocial instability and loneliness. Currently she make project about the mutual relations of four women in a generational chain, about creating bonds, motherhood, devotion, passing, sacrifice. Love in the family community or maybe the lack of it and longing for it… The family is a system of communicating vessels. Everything that happens to one of its members affects the others, and each new system is based on at least two others. She was created collages using fragments of photos from the family album and a delicate material such as glass. She referring to the fragility of life - the hypersensitivity of each of they, grandmother, mother and daughter.