Karolina Grzywnowicz

Walking through Underwater Meadows is an olfactory installation that draws on the scent-related history of the Psychiatric Hospital in Rybnik. It began with a need to learn how smell could offer space for healing and quiet forms of connection within an environment shaped by isolation and institutional routines.

Although scents were never formally incorporated into therapy at the hospital, they nonetheless played a subtle therapeutic role. Until the late 1990s, mattresses filled with seagrass were produced on the hospital grounds. Warmed by body heat, the seagrass released essential oils known for their calming and soothing properties, helping patients fall asleep more easily.

Underwater Meadows is first and foremost a work about loss — a loss tied both to the past and to the future, shaped by mourning, grief, and practices of individual and collective remembrance. It emerged from a personal loss — the death of the artist’s closest friend. The installation grew out of a refusal to contain grief within the static, finite form of a sculpture. Instead, it remains unstable, fragile, and constantly changing, allowing its material condition to mirror the labour of memory itself, as well as the impossibility of ever fully reconciling oneself with the loss of someone deeply loved.

At the same time, the work is also a lament for a lost future. Seagrass meadows are among the oldest and most important marine ecosystems on Earth. They provide shelter, breeding grounds, and nourishment for countless marine organisms, while also stabilising sediments and filtering water. They are also among the planet’s most efficient carbon sinks, capable of storing enormous amounts of carbon for centuries. Yet these fragile ecosystems are increasingly threatened by global warming and water pollution. In the Baltic Sea, underwater meadows once spread across areas such as the Bay of Puck; today, most of them have disappeared. Once widely used as a local raw material — for example in upholstery and mattress production — seagrass has largely vanished from everyday life together with the ecosystems from which it came. In this sense, Underwater Meadows approaches seagrass not only as a material, but also as a living archive of disappearance.

The work also draws from mourning rituals and funeral traditions from Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic region, and Germany, in which plants and organic materials functioned as mediators between presence and absence. Woven grasses, branches, wreaths, and other fragile vegetal forms were suspended in spaces of transition — near homes of the deceased, along processional routes, in chapels, or during seasonal rituals devoted to the dead — where they acted as temporary markers between the worlds of the living and the dead. In many of these traditions, mourning was grounded in repetitive gestures performed collectively: weaving, binding, hanging, and remaining together with materials that moved with air currents, slowly decayed, and transformed over time. In this sense, the act of making itself became a form of vigil — a quiet practice of endurance through which grief could be shared rather than resolved.