natalia dominika janula

Natalia Janula is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, performance, moving image and participatory practice. Her work explores the relationships between bodies, objects and environments, treating materials as active collaborators rather than passive matter. Through assemblage, soft sculpture, found objects, kinetic elements and organic materials, she creates speculative ecologies where the boundaries between human and non-human, natural and artificial, animate and inanimate become fluid.

Drawing on feminist new materialism, queer ecology, phenomenology and folklore, Janula examines uncertainty as a productive condition through which new forms of kinship, care and transformation can emerge. Her practice is rooted in making as a process of thinking, allowing materials to resist, misbehave and exceed their intended functions. Rather than producing fixed narratives, her installations invite open-ended encounters in which touch, movement and embodied experience become ways of knowing.

Her current research, Making Oddkin: The Misbehaving Object, investigates how objects can disrupt systems of categorisation and utility, proposing alternative relationships based on interdependence, reciprocity and ecological entanglement. Influenced by the shifting landscapes of coastal environments and her East European cultural heritage, Janula understands transformation as an ongoing negotiation with instability rather than a state to be overcome.

Through immersive installations and collective encounters, she creates spaces where vulnerability, play and material agency encourage audiences to imagine more-than-human futures founded on mutual care, adaptability and shared responsibility.

Alongside my practice, I enjoy swimming, cooking and reading tarot. These activities offer different ways of slowing down, paying attention and connecting with intuition, ritual and care—qualities that also inform how I make art. Whether through time spent in water, preparing meals to share with others or engaging with symbolic systems, I am drawn to practices that encourage reflection, reciprocity and collective experience.