Olivia Jaszczur

Olivia Jaszczur is a Polish-Canadian artist based in Guelph, Ontario, where she is currently completing her studies in Studio Art at the University of Guelph. Working across painting, sculpture, and printmaking, her practice is rooted in memory, inheritance, and the quiet search for belonging.

As a first-generation Polish immigrant, Olivia has often felt both connected to and distanced from her cultural and familial history. She turns to family archives as a starting point — old photographs, stories, fragments of memory — and gently reimagines the moments she did not live herself. Through painting, she attempts to fill in the spaces between generations, exploring themes of religion, politics, family dynamics, and Polish identity from her own lived perspective.

Her work is not meant to be strictly representational. Instead, it is intuitive and exploratory — an emotional reconstruction rather than a literal retelling. Colour plays a powerful role in this process. Because painting is experienced through sight alone, Olivia uses heightened colour to echo the way memory intensifies feeling over time. Each brushstroke is intentional and indexical — a visible trace of the human hand — carrying the emotion of someone reaching toward a history that is both personal and inherited.

For Olivia, exhibiting her work is an act of sharing. While her paintings help her make sense of her cultural and familial ties, they also invite viewers to see themselves within the images. In that exchange, memory becomes collective. An experience that was never hers alone becomes something we can all recognize.

In March 2025, Olivia placed in the Top 10 of the University of Guelph’s Annual Juried Art Show and exhibited at the Zavitz Gallery. She also participated in the Art Gallery of Guelph’s Summer Exhibition 155,578 and was recently published in Kaleidoscope Magazine.