sam grabowska studio

Three sculptures and a video come together as a meditation on the body as it tries to find refuge and heal from harm. The sculptures writhe in response to the institutional power of the pedestal. In the video, humans inhabit the ruins of a body and seek soothing.

At the core of the installation, six curved lines emerge from the ground. They trace the form of a body in repose. Human hair hangs from each line, disconnected from the plaster wrapping, suspended in space. Below this structure lies a basin. It is a carved-out topography of an entombed or prenatal figure. The viewer is held in tension with the structure, unable to enter, but invited to imagine inhabiting the intimate interiority nevertheless. 

The title comes from a meditation on Harry Harlow's 1958 "Wire Mother Experiment," which studied an infant's tactile needs from its mother for basic survival and development. This work intends to probe: in the absence of sensory care from a person, can architecture become a surrogate? When we are abandoned, displaced, or harmed, what remains to reclaim and rebuild?

gallery photo courtesy of Wes Magyar

Sanctum for 1985 is a meditation on our earliest childhood trauma. The work centers on the longing for refuge that we wish we had then, the way time rearranges itself after trauma, and the manner that our bodies calcify and grow around that experience. The rib-like tubes were formed around a person lying on their side in a fetal position. They echo like rings of a tree trunk, documenting the context and experiences of every year, each different from the last. Human hair cascades from each piece carrying DNA mutated and shaped by intergenerational trauma. A gentle breath of air keeps this "body" moving.

This site-specific installation is a meditation on loss, grief, and the reconstruction of an absent body. The rib-like armatures trace and recall the shape of a nonbinary model, who Grabowska photographed in poses of embracing, kneeling, and sheltering. The artist has suspended the work over a threshold between the galleries. The installation connects a space of transition to sensory membranes and tunnels, such as the birthing canal and mouth, that translate our inner life to the outer world and vice versa.

Photos courtesy of Wes Magyar

A multi-site roving performance. Visitors were beckoned to donate snippets of their hair which I sewed onto my shroud.  AI-assisted generated video played back memories of my grandparents' experiences in Poland before, during, and after WWII.

Photos courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.

A 3d model animation of a figure’s outline traced in flesh, mud, and hair.

An interactive installation centered on the domains of psychological care, self-made space, and psychogeography. Half tongue-in-cheek, half earnest attempt, the project invites visitors to create their own “care environment.” Using AI-assisted video, looped audio, and 3D modeling, a custom mixed-reality environment generates to respond to specific input.

Visitors start by filling out an intake form that offers a narrative waltz into discomfort, moodiness, reflection, and bodily sensations. After completing the form, they are matched with a simulated environment. Can this environment care for them better than a person, a clinician, or the everyday world? 

They walk behind the screen and donate their shadow self to the archive. Casting a shadow onto projected reality. They remain anonymous but their presence leaves an indelible trace (they are, after all, being monitored and recorded in this intimate moment). The videos of visitor interaction play in a different area of the gallery throughout the duration of the show, accumulating.

Photos courtesy of Third Dune Productions

A digital sculpture probing structural trauma, emotional processing, and the yearning for change.

All that's left of us: a skinned hide of an industrial animal.

A landscape of consumption.

An absent body you want to touch (but can't).

So we paved over paradise. We built skyscrapers of predatory behavior. This is what we have to emerge from. Our concrete primordial soup.

Photo courtesy Wes Magyar.

Our scent and our fat and the shit we've been through. We did it alone, we say, proudly. (our demise)

An architectural section of a little place to forget, buried in our skin. From the French, an architecture built to throw someone into, to forget them, to kill them with neglect.

Mountains of genetic material cut off in an act of spiritual desperation. Trying to find intimacy in a concrete jungle.

An architectural section of a little place to remember; to run away to a galaxy their bodies haven't yet evolved enough to inhabit.

A place to wander; to mark in the landscape with our lifeline. A clumsy act of self-preservation.

acrylic, bioplastic, resin, void in the floor

approximately 36” l x 24” w x 24”d

Assuming (dangerously?) that we started out as something whole. The physical proof of invisible things. A documentation of our transmutation; the eruptions, the drifts, the fragmentations.

chemically burned human hair, concrete, fencer wire, insulation

58” x 36” × 4”

Our innards or our skin. Turned inside out and rightside in. This is protection or maybe a slow erosion of what we could be.

conduit, insulation, grocery bags, concrete