Artist, photographer, musician and art historian, Tadhg Mae artist Agnieszka Szuba has participated in numerous individual and group exhibitions and has illustrated over 50 books and album covers.She uses multiple techniques to achieve shimmering, dark images rooted in fairytales and myths. Agnieszka’s pagan imagery hides secrets and opens doors to worlds of magic. Agnieszka is an explorer of all that is magical and mythical. A cantadora she collects tales, spells and whispers fashioning them into her art. You’ll find Agnieszka’s prints in the gallery, as well as her beautifully intricate and dreamy jewellery pieces.
You’re a story collector. What tale resonates most with you and why?
I’ve always thought of myself as a cantadora – a keeper and teller of stories, the way Clarissa Pinkola Estés describes women who gather tales like seeds and breathe them back into life. There isn’t one tale that defines me, because I live among many. They come from my childhood, from Slavic forests and Irish shores, from dreams and daydreams, from things overheard and things half-forgotten.
Like my father once did, I don’t simply repeat stories – I reshape them. I stitch them from fragments, from wishes, from desires, until they feel like my own. For me, fairytales are not fixed texts but living companions, reminding me that we carry myths inside us and retell them every time we create.
Which other artists inspire you?
I’ve always been drawn to the artists who paint with reverence, as if the world itself were a manuscript of light and shadow. The Pre-Raphaelites speak to me in their longing for beauty and myth. The millefleurs backgrounds of late medieval Europe, where every flower is a prayer, feel like my natural landscape.
I am endlessly inspired by 13th-century Siena, by Byzantine mosaics, by the gold that glows like eternal dawn. I return often to illuminated manuscripts and the hands that worked in medieval scriptoria, layering pigment and memory on parchment. Even the illustrations in old fairytale books feel to me like secret maps. And I have a particular love for the Catalan painters of the 13th and 14th centuries, whose sacred strangeness never quite left me.
I suppose you could say I am a medieval soul, gathering fragments of the past and carrying them into my own work, like relics that still breathe.
How would you like your art to make people feel?
I would like my art to be a doorway. When people stand before it, I want them to feel as if they’ve stepped out of the grey, cold world and into the shimmer of a fairytale. I want them to sense that moment of escape, where cruelty softens and imagination takes over.
If they feel wonder, or a kind of recognition – as though they’ve found a fragment of a story they once knew but had forgotten – then I feel the work has done its magic.
What do you love most about autumn?
What I love most about autumn is my velvet darkness of evenings — the way the light dims and the world softens, inviting calm before the long winter sleep. There is a gentleness in that quiet, as if everything is exhaling.
I love the last warm walks in the forest, where falling leaves turn into flakes of gold swirling through the air. The branches still hold the last fruits, and there is a sweet smell of silence. Autumn is colourful, yes, but it is also slowly undressing for night — a season of beauty dissolving into stillness.
