Agata Iwaszkiewicz spent many years as a painter before picking up a ball of clay for the first time at 41, immediately recognizing that she had found the medium she’d been searching for. Working under the name Ceramika Matylda from her base in Gdańsk, Poland, she describes the shift as instinctive rather than studied — ideas arrived quickly, and a clear direction for her practice followed almost as fast. On her own site, she frames each finished object as an intimate, self-contained world shaped by her own thoughts and loosely tied to the presence of animals, carrying a mix of quiet darkness, tenderness, and a touch of the grotesque, an approach that reads clearly in the rough, hand-built surfaces and slightly exaggerated proportions of her figures.
Dogs sit at the center of her output, rendered with playful, cartoonish faces and elongated, spaghetti-like limbs that feel simultaneously familiar and a little strange. That tension between comfort and oddity gives the work its emotional pull, and it turns personal in her more recent output: a collection of poodle figures made in memory of her own dog, Rudolf, functioning as a way to process his loss while marking the happiness he brought into her life. The pieces avoid sentimentality by leaning into humor instead, using exaggeration as a way to hold grief and joy in the same object.
Much of her catalog operates at the intersection of sculpture and use — jars, candleholders, and salt-and-pepper shakers built around animal forms — though she’s steadily pushing further into standalone sculptural work, including a scene of a horse leaping over a wave while carrying an octopus along for the ride. She keeps the work deliberately open to interpretation, favoring humor and playfulness over heavy-handed messaging, while still grounding every piece in her own sense of aesthetics and what she considers beautiful. That balance — technically loose, conceptually deliberate — is what keeps her expanding practice cohesive across mediums.
More info: Website, Instagram.
in Bahia.