PsychoFlower draws inspiration from the origins of the archetypal image of a witch on a broomstick, which stems from the psychedelic practices of women who cultivated the Datura flower. Historically, these women prepared psychoactive ointments—often called flying balms—using cauldrons and wooden sticks. The ointments were applied to the lymphatic areas of the body, such as the armpits or inner thighs, with the very sticks they stirred with. Datura’s alkaloids, absorbed through the skin, would induce powerful visions, often of flying—thus giving rise to the enduring image of a witch astride her broom.
Over the past few years, I’ve researched and developed an intuitive relationship with the Datura plant, both in Poland and in upstate New York. Its seductive, toxic bloom became a portal through which I explored the pain of the feminine experience within patriarchal systems, and its transformative potential for ecstatic liberation.
In my native Polish, the word for 'witch' is wiedźma, which comes from wiedza—meaning ‘knowledge.’ In ancient Slavic culture, the wiedźma was a healer, oracle, and mediator between worlds. One of the most powerful figures in this lineage is Baba Yaga, who exists in dual form. The elder wiedźma holds ancestral wisdom, while her younger counterpart—whom I call Agni—embodies fire, sexual energy, and the generative mystery from which life emerges.
PsychoFlower was first presented on December 13, 2024, as part of my MFA in Sculpture at SUNY New Paltz. The work included a sculptural installation and a 13-minute sound-based performance invoking the energy of the dark feminine. Held on Friday the 13th—sacred to Venus and the lunar cycles—the piece became a ritual within institutional space. I delivered a Witch Monologue exploring feminine power as a life portal, then swung on the Witches Swing, laughing hysterically in an act of ecstatic release. The intimate audience echoed the nature of the dark feminine: powerful, disruptive, and often marginalized.
Art is alchemy—a process where the mixing of unusual ingredients produces new meanings and enables time travel, merging spaces, landscapes, ideas, and lifetimes.
The Living is both an installation and a trance, weaving together the living room of my childhood in Poland with its lore playing on monitors reminiscent of past aesthetics and its mountain-view wallpaper. This childhood space merges with the landscape of the Shawangunks, the home my six-year-old son now calls his own. The work reimagines mythologies, blending old Slavic fairy tales with the lore of the land—original Lenapehoking and Kuwehoki, the land of the pine trees—where the pyre evokes the warmth and memory of the home’s hearth.
Within The Living, my world emerges from a tapestry of cultural influences, just as material culture reflects the global economy. The BaSla videos (Baltic and Slavic animal movement) and the wallpaper image of the Seven Sisters constellation were created in alignment with the energies of Full Moons, fusing the elemental powers of the universe with the collaborative process of art-making. The Slavic tropes of flowery fabrics tell their own layered story of economic dependency and conquest, produced in the Global South, sold in the West, and reclaimed from landfills in my hometown of Ełk, in Poland’s Masurian Lake District.
We are not all equal. Those of us from the edges of the Western empire can claim the power of a symbolic gesture —through art.
