About the artist
Dr Adelheid Frackiewicz (von Maltitz) is an esteemed artist and academic, currently serving as the academic Head of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of the Free State. She is also a senior lecturer, specialising in drawing and sculpture and supervises both undergraduate and postgraduate students. Dr Frackiewicz holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Faculty of the Humanities, Departments of Fine Arts and Art History and Image Studies at the University of the Free State. Her Thesis for her doctoral degree was titled: Art, Place, Death: The Transformative Power of Dynamic Thresholds.
Dr Frackiewicz co-authored the chapter, “Spontaneous shrines and the studio desk: learning form working with objects through an art-informed, practice-led lens” in the book, Object Medleys: interpretive possibilities for educational research (2017). In 2015 Dr Frackiewicz received an invitation to be a visiting artist for a two-month period at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA.
Dr Frackiewicz has participated in several local and international exhibitions and in 2014 she was awarded the ‘runner-up’ prize in Sasol New Signatures. Most notably in 2021, Dr Frackiewicz was honoured as one of the three Absa L'Atelier Ambassadors.
Cleansing
Lint, resin, moulded teeth, Plexiglass - 2022
This particular artwork is from a group exhibition with the other two 2021 Absa L'Atelier Ambassadors, that opened in the Absa Gallery in 2022. For Dr Frackiewicz, the making of sculptures, installations and drawings involves processes that allow her to think and work through personal anxieties regarding the trauma of loss and death. These anxieties stem from two main places. Firstly, a fear that something could happen (like a car accident or an illness that results in death) to her two young girls now or in the future, and secondly an intergenerational anxiety passed on from her Polish grandfather who escaped Europe during the Second World War. Most of the materials Dr Frackiewicz uses in her artworks are site-specific, either directly collected from a site of trauma and loss or attempting to reference that site. These site-specific materials include earth from German concentration camps in Poland, cremated animal bones, human teeth, human hair and skin, nail clippings, breastmilk and lint. This particular artwork signifies the holocaust of the Jewish people in German concentration camps during World War II.
