Anna Bera is a multidisciplinary creative, woodcarver and carpenter specializing in functional art using wood as her main medium. She was born in 1985 and raised in a small village in the Swietokrzyskie Mountains, Poland. Since 2014 she runs her own design studio and workshop based in Warsaw dedicated to creating unique objects, crafted by hand from wood, with inspiration coming from Bera's observations of the relationship between humans and nature — from a biological, spiritual, and cultural perspective. The artist focuses on the ways the objects are used and on their ritualistic significance in everyday life. She creates sculptural furniture and utility objects, the form of which does not reveal the functionality, instead encouraging the users to explore and give them their own meaning. Her work has been exhibited in Poland, Europe, the US and South-East Asia.
There’s a moment when something that hasn’t previously existed as a possibility comes about magically, as it were because it happens unexpectedly and immediately, incontrovertibly, you might say. The appearance of that something isn’t the result of deliberations, of observation, and ascertainment, but belongs under the category of yes-no. Existence-non-existence. And, as with something which was not, but is, what’s astonishing in the end is the obviousness of that something’s existence. Because that something comes about without my participation. This isn’t creating, but more a matter of watching as it emerges or rather as it simply is, because it doesn’t appear, it doesn’t emerge in time, there’s just nothing and then... something. Although, perhaps, even if there isn’t anything, because there’s no impression of an empty space, the consciousness of the possibility that something doesn’t exist. - Anna