Under the Walnut Tree

When building spaces for myself — physical, virtual, or emotional — I often think about the importance of places that offer shelter, allow us to grow, and give us somewhere to return after setbacks, where we can begin again.

Memories naturally mingle with imagination when I design a website, begin a painting, or rearrange the furniture in my child’s room. They shape what eventually emerges.

When I was growing up, there was a woodshed beside our house. A small building without a door, its walls lined with stacked logs. Beside it stood a large walnut tree whose branches stretched across part of the yard, casting shifting shadows over the ground in summer.

 

The woodshed beside my family home in Poland.

 

Inside the woodshed, there was always a kind of half-light. Warm reflections from the cut wood mixed with the cold air drifting in from outside. I still remember the smell clearly — freshly cut timber, damp earth, autumn air. Even now, it remains one of the scents that feels most like home to me.

We heated the house with wood, so stacking logs was one of our regular jobs as children. I actually liked it. None of us rushed. My siblings and I would spend long stretches of time there talking while arranging the wood piece by piece along the walls.

There is something about simple physical work that changes the rhythm of thought. Ideas settle differently, quietly arranging themselves layer upon layer, like the logs themselves.

I still often picture my grandfather, my father, or my brother chopping wood there.

 

My grandfather and younger brother beside stacked logs in the garden.

 

Years later, while studying painting in Kraków, one of our lecturers gave us an assignment. We were each asked to bring a photograph — something meaningful or completely random.

I chose one almost without thinking. It showed two small children sitting on the ground, building with wooden blocks. One child was constructing a tower while the other held a single block, examining it carefully.

At first I said I had chosen the photograph because it felt carefree and joyful. I liked that there were two children rather than one. I liked the idea of building something together — constructing, destroying, and beginning again endlessly.

Then the lecturer told us the photograph would become the starting point for a self-portrait. We were asked to create a three-dimensional work inspired by it.

At the time, I only wanted to paint. I had gone to art school to work on canvas, not to make objects or installations. But the work still had to be done.

My first instinct was to recreate the arrangement of blocks from the photograph.

I called my father.

At home, we always had scraps of wood near the woodshed, and I knew he would help me make them. When I arrived home for the weekend after a seven-hour bus journey from Kraków, he already had a bag filled with wooden pieces waiting for me.

We sanded them together outside beside the woodshed, spreading them across the circular saw table nearby.

I remember my father standing there after work in his everyday clothes — jeans, a checked shirt, a light jacket. The sound of sandpaper against wood. Cold air. Sunlight. Walnut leaves rustling above us in the wind.

He told me to sand them outside so the dust would not stay in the house, and to cover my mouth and nose so I would not breathe it in.

I also remember how amused he was by the whole thing — especially by the idea that something he had made for me would end up at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.

His work had nothing to do with art, although he could build almost anything when necessary.

What he possessed, more than anything, was a sensitivity toward people.

 

With my father at home in the 1990s.

 

He loved conversation. Talking with him was rarely only talking. Every story became animated. He reenacted scenes, changed voices, built tension, and moved gradually toward some conclusion. Conversations with him often lasted far longer than expected because each memory opened another one.

He used to say that no two trees in a forest are identical, and that people should be approached the same way — individually, not reduced to categories or comparisons.

What I remember most strongly now is not only his words, but the atmosphere he created around him.

 

My youngest siblings in the family orchard.

 

As children, we had a great deal of freedom inside the world our parents created for us. We built entire cities from blocks across the bedroom floor, played in the abandoned house that had once belonged to our great-grandparents, built shelters outside, and invented worlds in gardens and corners of the yard.

Like most teenagers, I eventually dreamed of leaving as far away as possible. At that age, home can feel too small for the life you imagine for yourself. You believe the real beginning of your life must exist somewhere else.

Now, living far from the place where I grew up, speaking another language and raising children between cultures, I understand home differently.

There are still moments when it feels difficult to fully call this place home. Living between languages can create a strange internal hesitation, as though part of the self remains untranslated. Certain memories and emotions still arrive in Polish first. Sometimes I notice that the voice inside my head belongs entirely to one place, while my daily life belongs to another.

 

A small wooden house that my father built for his grandchildren in the garden.

 

I hear my daughter moving naturally between languages and realise she will experience home differently than I did — perhaps more fluidly, without always noticing where one language ends and another begins.

Yet I know she, too, will inherit certain distances I cannot fully name for her yet.

In my family, there were already stories of displacement, resettlement, lost homes, and lives rebuilt elsewhere. Perhaps this kind of movement leaves traces that continue quietly across generations.

Sometimes life feels like a continuous process of building and rebuilding. Learning how to belong to more than one place at once.

 

My father playing with my daughter.

 

For a long time, as long as my father was alive, part of me believed that home still existed somewhere outside me. That if things failed, if life became difficult, if my work did not become what I hoped for, I could always begin again from there.

Now the structures that once protected me can no longer exist outside me in the same way. They must somehow continue internally.

Perhaps this is why the photograph of the children with blocks was never random at all.

Looking back now, it may have been one of the most accurate self-portraits I could have chosen.

Painting, too, feels like an attempt to build a place of that kind — somewhere another person might briefly feel less alone.