Anna Kmita/ Minimalism

Graduate of the industrial design program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Member and co-founder of the Polish Association of Color. Works at alma mater, teaches color design, and co-runs the Design Fundamentals Studio. In the recent years she has conducted research programmes related to preserving the heritage and re-establishing social awareness of forgotten industrial design elements, which constitute the history, culture and identity of Silesia. The programmes have been finalised as publications, presentations and international conferences in Poland and abroad, as well as implementations in the area of applied arts in collaboration with local industry.

The designer’s motivation was to re-establish the tradition of unique, commemorative plate production, transformed in a new, creative way and transposed into the contemporary visual language in collaboration with the users. As the designer’s main idea is to save existing products of material culture from oblivion, the starting material was plates and bowls made over the recent decades in the factories of Upper and Lower Silesia. The objects on which the graphic design was placed had been bought on flea markets, handed over by private persons, often time-worn, chipped, cracked, and shabby. Combined with modern artwork, they were given a second life. The designer followed a simple rule: the use of several basic patterns (dots, lines, waves) of different weights and proportions allows you to design any visually synthetic image, present places, buildings, fragments of space, maps, recalled by the participants of the project. The visual patterns were printed on overglaze silk-screen decals and, based on selected views, cropped and laid out into final images, later fixed in the baking process. The combination of the old (second-hand plates) and the new (contemporary, highly synthetic graphic design) resulted in interesting visual effects. This helped repel the perception of commemorative plates as objects with an outdated, mundane aesthetic form, and re-establish them as exquisite, desired collector’s or daily objects.