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The title Pockets Full of Stones refers to early memories—childhood practices of gathering small finds, as well as a fascination with the world of objects that tends to elude adults in the rush of everyday life. The project seeks to draw attention to the value of what exists on the margins. The artist invites us to collectively lean in toward the presented objects with care, treating them as traces—carriers of memory.

 

The work is accompanied by a reflection on collecting and hoarding, themes already present in the artist’s earlier projects: Riots (2021), Everything That Is No Longer There or Will Soon Be Gone (2022), and Look What I Found (2023). In the current realisation, these threads are further developed toward mapping the movement of matter, revealing its constant circulation between places, contexts, meanings, and bodies.

 

The project traces the journeys of objects—their loss and rediscovery. It is also an attempt to grasp the emotions accompanying this journey: from intimate attachment and sentimentality to the experience of engaging with what is shared. The abundance implied by the titular pockets is, in a sense, emptied out, allowing us to witness a movement that usually remains invisible and becomes perceptible only at the subtle intersection of matter and memory.

 

Magdalena Tryba (born 2000) is an artist and researcher, currently studying at the Faculty of Intermedia at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts and at the Faculty of Management and Social Communication at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In her artistic practice, she focuses on working with found objects as carriers of potential narratives. She is interested in the phenomenon of collecting, which she treats as a particular form of performance embedded in everyday life. Her work operates at the intersection of assemblage and installation, and also incorporates video and performance.

She is a recipient of the Santander Scholarship (2025), the Grey House Foundation Award (2024), the Młode WilkiFestival Award (2024), and a scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2024). Her works have been shown, among others, at the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, during the Turnus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and at Cracow Art Week in Kraków.