Duch skał i gleby - Marta Węglińska

Spirit of Rocks and Soil

Interdisciplinary project · mask and glove – performative objects · shields – performative objects · cyanotype on cotton (various dimensions) · cyanotype on paper · performance for nature – series of photographs and video – photographic collaboration with Alyona Leshchenko · field research-based practice · 2024–2026

The project received funding from the European Union under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NextGenerationEU).

Project realised during the Disappearing Landscape artist residency, organised by Machaon International in Gánovce, Slovakia.

Origin and beliefs

The performative figure of the Spirit of Rocks and Soil draws on ancient beliefs that treated the earth — the soil — as sacred, and the natural environment as powerful and awe-inspiring. The Spirit emerges from mountains, rocks and ground.

The Spirit of Rocks and Soil appears in wild, steep rocky gorges, in remnants of natural forests — more often mountain than lowland. It visits sites connected to pastoral traditions, especially around abandoned highland shepherd shelters. Occasionally it can be found in sub-mountain areas heavily degraded by human activity. It is silent. It moves slowly along narrow paths — its long whiskers stir in the wind.

The Spirit's appearance

The Spirit's face is covered with minerals. It has wide ears merging into two whiskers — long bands covered with mountain landscapes, Jurassic terrain, caves, rocks and minerals. From its hand grows a long, thin mineral icicle. It is accompanied by shields — hexagonal minerals. The Spirit of Rocks and Soil merges symbiotically with various organisms — it fuses with monumental trees in mountain reserves, grows into human bodies, into highland shepherd shelters, into landscapes and ecosystems.

Technique and form

The concept is a living, performative image — a photograph. It consists of dozens of motifs, photographs, found footage and archival materials, processed using the cyanotype technique on cotton.

The project is part of a long-term Archive of Terrain Observations — a systematic documentation of ecologically valuable areas, combining scientific data, archival materials and personal experience of the terrain.

The third Spirit of Nature

This is the third of the Spirits of Nature — after the Spirit of Water and the Spirit of Plants and Fungi. All were made using cyanotype on cotton and grew out of years of field trips to ecologically significant areas: knowledge, data, but also personal impressions and inspirations gradually came together, forming each successive figure. In this project, the human becomes less visible, and the landscape and nature begin to live their own lives — on the border of myth, ritual and new tradition.

The Spirit's perspective

What would human life look like seen through the eyes of the Spirit of Rocks and Soil? What do rocks see, how do they perceive time flowing not in days but in millions of years? Does the Spirit of Soil see in humans only matter — elements circulating in the same cycle as every other part of the environment? The project proposes a non-human, geological perspective on human presence in nature — a question about the place of our species within deep time and within a web of relations.

Beskid Sądecki and Slovakia, 2025–2026

Part of the Spirit of Rocks and Soil photography was made in 2025–2026 in the Beskid Sądecki mountains — in wild gorges, near abandoned shepherd shelters, in forest reserves. These were the first places where the figure entered the terrain.

In August 2026, the project developed further during the Disappearing Landscape artist residency, organised by Machaon International in Gánovce, Slovakia. The valley at the foot of the High Tatras proved a particularly fitting location: on one side, Travertinová kopa Biely kameň — a travertine rock formation fed by a mineral spring that forms miniature terraces and pools, with a unique ecosystem of salt meadows full of halophytes. On the other — Nová Lesná, a few kilometres away: abandoned, unfinished residential developments, concrete skeletons of apartment buildings, rusting reinforcement bars, ground torn open and drained — and the Tatras in the background.

During the residency I ran workshops with young people from the Slovak-Ukrainian Hub in Kežmarok. Together we went into the field, collected visual material, and then made the Spirit of Rocks and Soil shields — hexagonal objects of cyanotype-exposed cotton stretched onto metal hoops. The material included archival mineral illustrations, geological maps, photographs of rocks and soil from the Gánovce area, and drone footage documenting the valley. Three workshop shields and two authored shields were produced.

In collaboration with photographer Alyona Leshchenko, a final photo and video session was made across both locations. At the travertine rock — the Spirit of Rocks and Soil among mineral layers, with participants holding the shields. In Nová Lesná — alone, among contemporary ruins, with traditional sheep bells in hand — an object from a different temporal and cultural order, evoking a pastoral tradition disappearing from this landscape as fast as concrete appears on it.

The juxtaposition of both locations became the central element of the project: rock and concrete, geological process and construction process, a landscape shaped over thousands of years and one transformed within decades . The Spirit of Rocks and Soil is a figure that allows us to look at these transformations from a perspective longer than a human one. The project brings together environmental observation, work with a local community, a collective creative process and performative action in the landscape — raising questions about the nature and permanence of human interventions in the terrain. It also opens the question of whether spaces permanently altered by development can still change their character, and what forms the landscape might yet take in the future.

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