In her work Bańda uses themes traditionally associated with the art of women, but she does not give them a markedly ideological meaning and she does not claim to be a feminist. She paints within a characteristic range of colours dominated by shades of pink, red and white. These colours are associated with physicality and sensuality, yet they also evoke the atmosphere of little girls’ rooms. This combination of female sexuality with childlike innocence is characteristic of the style and themes of the artist’s works, which intrigue with their dissonance, obvious inconsistencies and contradictions. Beside the confessions of a mature woman and the large dose of bold eroticism appears the personage of a little girl, innocent, thirsty for feelings, and surrounded by toys. This figure of a woman-girl and the mixture of nearly pornographic content with form borrowed from the aesthetics of children’s drawings imbue the artist’s works with a sense of sublime perversion.
Bańda’s highly erotic creations do not lend themselves to simple description, they are filled with exciting tension. The intimate experiences, which the artist portrays, become disturbingly ambiguous. The painted or embroidered silhouettes in passive poses with spread legs often lose their gender identity; it is unclear whether they are women or men. What seems obvious at first glance soon becomes the cause of doubt and anxiety. The pleasant is combined with the perverse, the sensitive with the vulgar, intimacy with rape. Bańda’s works explore a whole range of sensations, emotions and desires brimming over with erotic fantasies, accompanied by ‘monsters’ like shadows – these are fears and concerns emerging from the subconscious. The works oscillate around the most deeply concealed privacy, which the artist does not hesitate to expose to the public. They are often compared to those of Tracy Emin, one of the most famous eccentrics revealing the secrets of her bedroom.
Bańda’s painting combines the aesthetics of pop art, naive art and comics; it also resonates with echoes of Basquiat and Niki de Saint Phalle. She uses a lot of ‘female’ techniques such as embroidery, sewing and knitting, following the tradition of the older generation of artists, including Maria Pinińska-Bereś and Annette Messager. She enriches her works with decorative elements, using glitter, beads and trinkets, sewing frills, lace and buttons, attaching toys and small soft materials, and sometimes gives her paintings the form of private quasi-altars. Many of them include fragments of children’s worsted sweaters, hats, scarves in pastel colours or wool dresses.
In order to reach what is hidden underneath, viewers must ‘undress’ them, undo the buttons. This action gives the sense of exposing the body, of penetrating into someone’s privacy, which, combined with the physical touch of soft texture, becomes close to an act of voyeurism. Even more so when we uncover the painting and find bodies in erotic poses, allusions to sexual practices and fantasies. In the work Be Gone Monsters (2005), serpentine creatures with bared teeth crawl towards a white children’s jacket, and the viewer, who is encouraged to undo a button, becomes one of them. The phallic shape of the snakes reveals the nature of these monsters, which are frightful, yet alluring and coveted. In another work the artist covered the act with knitted breast with embroidered inscription: ‘naked be gone me beautiful’.