BIO

Weronika Hempel (Voo Voo Lay) born in Poland in 1994.

A graduate of the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw, where she studied New Media Art and Graphic Design, earning her diploma in the printmaking studio of Professor Andrzej Kalina.

A contemporary abstract artist currently living and working in Warsaw and Zamość.

Her early academic training focused on graphic visualization, shaping a strong sensitivity to form and composition. Over the years, she has expanded her artistic interests to include various visual media, yet it is painting that has become the dominant field of her creative expression, a space where she combines technical discipline with intuition, emotion, and sensuality.

Floral motifs, subtly present in some of her compositions, are not literal depictions of nature but poetic metaphors of transience, cyclicality, and transformation, expressed through color and composition. The artist is fascinated by change, by the processes of human neuroplasticity and emotional transformation, with flowers becoming a symbol of these phenomena – a reflection of rebirth and beauty emerging from change.

Hempel’s work is defined by a deep engagement with freedom and sensuality.The paintings from her “Jardins” collection are rooted in personal experience, created primarily in her studio in Zamość, and inspired by, among other things, her mother’s garden –  serving as a metaphor for change, renewal, and the natural cycle of life.

The Jardins (Gardens) series grew out of my observation of places especially close to me: the garden of my family home, where the same rhythms of growth, decay, and renewal have returned for years. In this everyday, almost meditative change, I see a reflection of the processes that also occur within the human being. I have always been fascinated by the beauty of flowers – their transience, strength, and constant ability to transform. In these qualities, I find something profoundly human.

The garden becomes, for me, a metaphor for life – a space where the natural, the emotional, and the spiritual are interwoven into a single, continuous process. I am interested in neuroplasticity – the mind’s capacity for constant transformation and adaptation. In my paintings, the garden is not only a place of nature, but also a mirror of the inner changes that occur within us throughout our lives. “Gardens” is a story about transformation and endurance, about fragility and strength, about the cyclicality of life, which – much like nature itself – never truly comes to a halt. (Voo Voo Lay)