Alicja Patanowska’s ‘The Ripple Effect’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London
Alicja Patanowska’s installation, consisting of over two thousand ceramic tiles composed into soft, undulating shapes, tells the story of the long way between matter and art, and of how industrial profit determines our understanding of the value of raw materials. The work was created in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the UK/Poland 2025 Season cultural programme.
Located in the inner courtyard of London’s Victoria & Albert is the museum’s very heart: a garden with a pond. It is here that visitors seek respite from the countless sculptures, paintings, and artifacts of artistic craftsmanship by wading in the shallow water or basking in the sun. In spite of appearances, the picnic atmosphere does not detract from the respectability of this leading London art institution. On the contrary, it is an extension of its mission to promote art and culture, creating an environment of openness and freedom to reflect on the issues raised by its exhibitions.
It is in this setting that Alicja Patanowska, an interdisciplinary artist combining gallery art with craft and traditional media with contemporary themes, presents her latest installation, constructed specially for this occasion. The Ripple Effect is a natural result of the artist’s preoccupations to date: attentiveness to the materials used and exploration of their history, as well as discretion and subtlety in tackling even the most weighty subjects. The London installation consists of over two thousand hand-carved ceramic tiles. From a sea of gently rippling, undulating slabs in the intense colour of lapis lazuli, only a few islands of copper-coated tiles emerge, immediately distinguishable from the rest. The tiles tightly cover a surface tilting towards the central pool, and closer to the water surface, water gushes from the interior of the installation, splashing onto the shimmering tiles and, from beneath them, into the pool, where, as the title suggests, it forms regularly rippling circles.
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Alicja Patanowska and the installation ‘The Ripple Effect**’**, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 20 September 2025, photo: Kuba Celej / AMI
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Patanowska’s work, however, is not solely about the meditative here and now. The title’s idiom also refers to the domino or snowball effect, a process in which one action leads to a series of subsequent ones, which, in turn, trigger further events, increasingly difficult to predict. Using materials obtained from the Lower Silesian Iron Bridge – one of Europe’s largest waste disposal sites, supplying the resources for local copper production – and giving them an imaginative, organic form, the artist explores the impact of humans on the environment, the global metabolism that exerts disastrous impact on the planet’s climate. Beneath the veneer of ornamentation, Patanowska has smuggled into her work the history of the Earth’s creations: from the telluric darkness from which they were forcibly extracted, through the landfill of waste unsuitable for industry, to the art institution, where, thanks to the artist, their priceless value is revealed, immeasurable by the standards of an economy focused on constant growth and profit.
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Alicja Patanowska and the installation ‘The Ripple Effect**’**, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 20 September 2025, photo: Kuba Celej / AMI
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The contrast between these two orders is emphasized by the characteristic softness of Patanowska’s tiles, with their folds reminiscent of pleats in fabric and curves evocative of frozen sea waves. The boundaries between the artificial and the natural, the industrial and the artisanal, the mass-produced and the individual, are obviously blurred here – a clear reflection of the transitional moment our culture, driven by environmental degradation, finds itself in. A time when the old solutions have ceased to work, but new ones have yet to be implemented.
The tension between the scale of destruction and the potential for industrial development is, in turn, played out by the disproportion between the blue and the copper tiles. Two thousand against eight – a ratio corresponding to the ratio between overall extraction and the usefulness of the material. Patanowska turns this utilitarian thinking on its head: more important than individual, copper-clad tiles is the blue sea in which they are immersed. That which the industry has despised finds its exaltation in art.
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Alicja Patanowska and the installation ‘The Ripple Effect**’**, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 20 September 2025, photo: Kuba Celej / AMI
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In the context of the garden where the designer’s installation has been placed, it’s impossible to ignore the feeling that the strength, not only of this work, lies in its collective nature, its multiplicity, the merging of separate parts into one cohesive organism. Watching the dozens of visitors who sit next to or on the installation and touch the tiles, probing their texture and shape, one gets the impression that, above all else, The Ripple Effect speaks about this very act of being together.
Alicja Patanowska, The Ripple Effect
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
13/09–19/10/2025
The event is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 organised by the British Council, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Cultural Institute in London, financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland.
Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar