The Bench – Paweł Mysera

2016/2025
found object

For years, I’ve been drawn to cemetery furniture — particularly the abandoned, the neglected, the forgotten. These objects are traces of remembrance, expressions of grief once felt, and of tenderness and care.
Cemetery benches — silent companions to forsaken graves that no one visits anymore — often bear the quiet dignity of decay. Their steel frames are usually covered in a patina of rust, and their rotting wood has become moss-covered. The inevitability of time leaves its mark, stripping them of their original function. Their stumps seem to grow into the ground, or sink into the concrete slabs beneath.
Others, overtaken by plant life, dissolve into the living fabric of the natural world. Once useful for those who came to sit and stay near their loved ones, these benches now become objects of contemplation themselves — subtle witnesses to the fact that memory, too, dies.