Martynka Wawrzyniak

Ziemia is a public-art project created in collaboration with residents of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY that was completed and installed in June 2018. In the form of a ceramic sphere atop a native meadow in McGolrick Park, the piece bridges divides between the neighborhood's disparate subcultures by serving as a collective portrait of the community through embodying residents' personal homelands and migration stories.

The ceramic orb is glazed with a mixture of clay excavated in Greenpoint and soils contributed by participating residents from places that are symbolically representative of their identities, including: The United States, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, France, Japan, Serbia, Nepal, the United Kingdom, Ecuador, Mexico, and Namibia. The project includes many Poles who have lived in Greenpoint for generations, and Wawrzyniak personally traveled to Poland to collect soil on behalf of Polish residents who were unable to make the journey. With soil—universally symbolic for one's roots and identity—as the medium, Ziemia gestures to the primal connection to Earth that underlies each individual's migratory experience. As the transitional phase in nature between death and life, soil refers to the cyclical patterns of neighborhood growth and change.

For her Feed exhibition, at envoy enterprises, New York in September 2014 Wawrzyniak committed to a year-long daily exercise which involved the use of one identical 20 x 20 -inch white cloth dinner napkin to wipe her mouth each night at dinner. She then proceeded to file the napkins with a detailed record of the ingredients of what she ate. The project culminated in an exhibition of the 365 soiled napkins sewn together in chronological order in the form of an interlocking, two-spiral 100-foot walk-in structure hanging from the gallery ceiling.

In 2014 she expanded the Smell Me olfactory self-portrait concept by exposing it to the wider public through guerilla advertising. The resultant piece, Eau De M, which consisted of the artist's sweat essence delivered by way of a magazine scent-strip fragrance advertisement, appeared as a double-sided insert in the full print run of the May 2014 issue of Harper's Bazaar. The advertisement became a vehicle for spreading her essence, letting the mass market consume her artwork unwittingly.

In her Smell Me exhibition at envoy enterprises, New York in fall 2012, Wawrzyniak created an installation reflecting a year-long project where she acted as both investigator and subject exploring and capturing her biological essence. Working with a research team of Hunter College Chemistry students: Paul Kozlowski, Charles Paszkowski, and Paul Tewfik, under the guidance of Professor Donna McGregor, the artist underwent multiple experiments to collect aromatic elements from her body. She was subject to rigorous sessions to extract the concentrated essence of her sweat, tears, and hair to create an olfactory-based self-portrait that would engage visitors in a visceral form of communication without visuality as primary form.

In 2011, Wawyrzyniak released Chocolate, a 9-and-a-half minute performance video in which the artist's face is slowly submerged in 16 gallons of chocolate syrup.

In November 2010, she contributed to 4 Sale, a collaboration of four female artists exploring conceptions of eroticism using themselves as the subjects. Wawrzyniak's contribution was a photo series of the four artists naked except for a camera, and a video of the four applying lipstick first conventionally to their lips and then in deranged fashion to the rest of their faces. In a review of the show, Artinfo described Wawrzyniak as owing "an allegiance both to the vamping of pinup girls and straightforward commercial portraiture", and praised the project as a "serious, well-crafted, yet approachable work that isn't afraid to handle sexuality with a mix of humor, drama, and the occasional dash of mysticism". W magazine commented that Wawrzyniak "explores femininity with both brutality and warmth".

In 2009 Wawrzyniak performed Ketchup, in which she stood blind folded as four 10-year-old boys armed with water guns filled with ketchup fired at her as she stood against a gallery wall. The video was later projected over the ketchup splattered wall with only the artist visible accompanied by audio of the boys voices. It was described by Walter Robinson of Artnet as being "like Lord of the Flies, but without the protective distance of fiction. "

Wawrzyniak's work has appeared in exhibitions, both collective and solo, since 2003.

Born in Poland, she moved to New Zealand at the age of eight and has lived in New York since 1998.

Martynka Wawrzyniak (born 1979) is a New York City-based, Polish-American mixed-media artist who works in photography, video, performance, sculpture, and installation.