Through my work I explore the essence of femininity. Notions of purity, softness and society’s expectations of women are examined using materials that reference the female experience. Crystalline sparkly sugar against delicate, luxurious icing creates curvaceous lines, feminine form and intricate undergarments. With a realistic and cheeky viewpoint, utilizing pin-up girl imagery and my own body, it is not merely the act of making beautiful objects, the processes and experimentation involved, the information acquired, is just as significant. My multi-disciplinary practice incorporates installation, photography, performance, print and sculpture.

Marzena Topka moved to Australia from Poland in 1983. She studied art history at the University of Western Australia, art at the WA School of Art Design and Media (Central TAFE) and is currently completing Masters of Creative Arts at Curtin University. She received an Award for Innovation (WA School of Art Design and Media, 2003) and has been selected for Hatched (2004). In 2009 her work was exhibited in dofa09 (John Curtin Gallery) and she was awarded a Galerie Dusseldorf Scholarship. Marzena works in a variety of media including video, installation and drawing. Material contaminations and translations are part of her process. If there is any logic to the material choices she makes it is that they may be light and insubstantial, transparent, or flimsy, so that they have a weaker relationship to natural laws of gravity. The aesthetics of malleability engages with structures, permeates them and signals their vulnerability. They are a play on existing conditions, impositions, and delineations. Her art practice encourages slippage: visual, sensorial and conceptual.
Image: Marzena Topka, Architecture & Amnesia, 2008. Acrylic and nylon, dimensions variable. The Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery. Photograph by Eva Fernandez.

At this stage of my career, my work has been about celebrating nature, transforming discarded objects from nature with the use of other materials and producing sculptural pieces that has the form of facial mask.