Tower Over Me with Barriers

As you walk down an ordinary sidewalk, something unexpected catches your eye. The beauty you have always admired in the arching trees and endless sky is reflected in the quiet, often unnoticed world beneath your feet. The ground—so often dismissed as mere pavement is, in truth, a silent canvas where time and nature conspire with the human touch to create something sublime. Cracks form like veins in stone, tiny blooms push through worn fissures and weathered surfaces whisper stories of resilience. Here, beneath our hurried steps, poetry exists in the language of erosion and endurance.

I was born in Gdańsk, a city with over a thousand years of history, where the streets bore the imprints of countless footsteps before mine. My childhood was shaped by a visceral connection to concrete not just as a backdrop, but as something tangible, something felt. Skinned knees and scraped elbows were my first lessons. As I grew, that relationship deepened into an instinctive love for architecture and the silent stories it tells. Even now, before I capture an image, my first impulse is to touch, to feel the roughness, trace any sign of wisdom, the life held within each surface.

At nine, I left my Polish homeland and found myself in Malmö, Sweden, where the streets bore a different kind of history. There, concrete endured  bitter winters, standing resolute against time and weather. But when I arrived in the United States in 1998, the landscape shifted again. Southern California, young and sun-bleached, seemed to tell a different story, one of reinvention rather than preservation, of surfaces still waiting to gather the weight of history. And now, a decade later, I find myself on the other coast, just outside of Philadelphia, where every alley, every crack in the pavement, every forgotten corner seems to hum with echoes of the past.

Drawn to these textures and the quiet poetry they hold, I began taking photographs. Intimate, abstract landscapes that captured what my eyes could not turn away from. Soon after I started experimenting with concrete on canvas. What you see is the result of that love affair—a dialogue between concrete and soul, a composite romance.