Last year, on the lawn outside the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland, Kasia Ozga (BFA ’04) installed one of her sculptures, a bust of a controversial Polish media figure. Then a flock of birds starting eating it.

Constructed entirely of bread, the sculpture embodied Ozga’s belief that art is somewhat ephemeral, not something to be preserved forever. “That’s an unnatural attitude toward time and the environment,” she says. “I like sculpture to have a more symbiotic relationship with its surroundings, to break down, before the eyes of the viewer, and go back into the environment from which it came.”

Like the pair of giant wicker breasts that Ozga wove and set floating on a pond. And the collection of sand and wax figures she erected on a beach that melted in the sun and got washed away by the sea. Even when Ozga works with materials that offer more permanence than a loaf of bread—wood, bronze, and clay, for example—she still prefers her art to, like the human body, “go through a life cycle of its own.”

Born in Poland and raised in Chicago, Ozga studied mostly painting at the Museum School; her work, she says, was “very physical and tactile. They were paintings that wanted to be sculptures.” Ozga returned to Poland for an MFA in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, and these days, armed with a Harriet Hale Woolley scholarship from the Fondation des Etats Unis and a joint Emerging Artist Travel Grant from the Polish and French governments, she lives in Paris. “I work in a lot of different mediums, but now I’m focused on ceramics,” she says. “There’s an earthy quality, a very basic quality to it, something that’s almost foreign to contemporary materials and to our day-to-day lives.”

Ozga’s ceramic pieces focus on hands. They appear to be ropes splaying out into palms and fingers that press together—or are they pulling apart? “You can read it both ways,” Ozga says. “Ropes can mean bondage, and slavery, but ropes are also links, holding things together.” Make no mistake, though, these hands, and the tension they hold, aren’t Ozga’s own. “I am not interested in expressing my feelings in my work,” she says. She’d rather “encourage viewers to see, feel, and think about themselves and the world around them in an active way.”

For more information about Ozga’s artwork, visit www.kasiaozga.com. To learn more about Ozga’s work promoting Polish artists, visit www.ozgart.com.