Natalia Gil
Textile art
Natalia Gil (b. 1996, Poland) is an artist based between Paris and Warsaw. She works across various media, with a particular focus on wool, often enriched with decorative elements such as beads, gems, and metallic threads. Her practice explores the idea of meaning, the impression of meaning, and the role of symbolism as a way of navigating uncertainty and constructing personal belief systems.
She graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2021. Alongside her individual artistic practice, she is a member of Texpol, a collective of female artists exploring the place and meaning of textiles within contemporary art, and co-founds the curatorial–artistic collective tajny stryszek (secret attic). She also co-runs the artistic jewellery and craft project bibi gems.
Her work has been shown in exhibitions and projects across Europe, including at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), Tresor Berlin, Oud House (Rotterdam), and during Warsaw Gallery Weekend and Fringe Warsaw. Her practice moves between the intimate and the symbolic, creating textile-based works that merge softness with emotional and existential intensity.
Statement
In my practice I create a visual world built from personal symbols, soft materials, and emotionally charged narratives. I am interested in meaning, and in the human need to believe that meaning exists, even when it remains uncertain or imagined. Through textile-based works, I explore themes of dysphoria, vulnerability, spirituality, and the search for inner coherence.
Wool is my primary material. It carries warmth, fragility, and tactility, but also allows me to build layered, almost painterly surfaces. I often incorporate decorative elements such as beads or metallic threads, blurring the line between ornament and symbol, tenderness and unease. These materials help me construct images that feel both intimate and slightly uncanny.
My works often resemble portals, icons, or fragments of inner mythologies. Figures, animals, houses, and symbolic signs appear not as fixed narratives, but as emotional states made visible. I am drawn to the space between comfort and anxiety, hope and fear, where the desire to understand the world coexists with the awareness that it may remain unresolved.
Through these soft yet intense images, I try to build a language of feeling, one that doesn't explain, but resonates.
