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- 10 - 19
There are artworks that speak quietly, and there are artworks that reach toward us with the unmistakable urgency of human need. Out of Touch by Paula Kloczkowski Luberda belongs to the latter, not through volume but through presence. Her hand-built stoneware sculptures — every curve, gesture, and contour formed without casting — capture the fragility of connection in a world strained by separation.
Across this body of work, hands become language. They plead, cradle, shield, resist, hesitate, and reach. They hold what we cannot articulate in words, carrying the weight of our collective longing for trust, reciprocity, and recognition. In Freedom, the wrists bound by coarse rope confront the viewer with the stark tension between captivity and hope, the hands lifted as if remembering a gesture of release. Trust, with its interwoven palms and intertwined fingers, speaks instead to the comfort of closeness and the risk it demands. Compromise fractures this tenderness — an outstretched arm breaks through a sheet of glass, the crack radiating like the sound of conflict caught mid-moment.
These hand-built forms become emotional architectures. In Opacity, the faint silhouettes pressed against a translucent surface evoke barriers that are felt more than seen, a haunting metaphor for the invisible distances we erect around ourselves. Works such as Interdependent and Enough scatter hands across the wall in choreographed constellations, suggesting both the multiplicity of human experience and the shared gestures that unite us. Indecision suspends two hesitant arms in open space, their unfinished reach capturing the delicate pause before choice.
What binds these works is not merely their material, but the artist’s devotion to touch as a fundamental human truth. Luberda’s sculptures engage the emotional terrain of acceptance, assurance, vulnerability, and fragmentation. In Unfeeling, hands obscure a face, not to hide identity but to signal the exhaustion of emotional overwhelm. In Try, hands lift a head upward, a gesture that reads as both offering and plea.
Through her practice, Luberda asks us to consider what it means to hold one another — figuratively, emotionally, physically — in a world increasingly marked by fear and distance. Her sculptures are reminders that compassion begins in small gestures, that empathy is learned by reaching outward.
Out of Touch runs from December 8, 2025 to February 8, 2026 at https://www.exhibizone.com/out-of-touch-exhibition.
Explore Paula Kloczkowski Luberda’s work at pklfineart.com, on Instagram @pklfineart, and through her Biafarin profile at http://www.biafarin.com/artist?name=paula-kloczkowski.
Artist:
As an established and widely exhibited artist for the past twenty-plus years, her work has been shown internationally at the Ceramics Biennale in Gautang, South Africa, and nationally at Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, California; Center for Emerging Art, Miami, Florida; George A. Spiva Center for the Arts, Joplin, Missouri; Texas Artists Museum, Port Arthur, Texas; and Salisbury State University, Salisbury, Massachusetts, to highlight a few. Regionally, her work was shown at the Rockford Art Museum, the Evansville Art Museum, Indiana University, the University of Wisconsin, North Central College, Illinois Institute of Art, Highland Park Art Center, and Harper College, Palatine, among her many exhibitions.
She has been represented by four Chicago-area galleries during the past 15 years and exhibited at numerous other venues, such as the annual SOFA Show at Navy Pier, the Illinois Institute of Art, the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Borders Book Store, and AT&T Corporate offices. Currently, her work is part of a traveling exhibition entitled “Breaking Criminal Traditions.” This exhibition has been shown in various galleries throughout the Midwest and, more recently, the East Coast, in Pennsylvania.
Along with her extensive exhibition history, she has won numerous awards, including the Illinois Institute of Art Purchase Award and a First Place Award. Other awards include a Merit Award from Salisbury State University, Best of Show at Nicolet College, Wisconsin, Third Place at Indiana University, a Merit Award at Quincy Art Center, Honorable Mention at Rockford Art Museum, and an Award of Excellence from the Norris Cultural Center in St. Charles, Illinois.
In addition to her professional work, she has also engaged in lectures and public speaking on her work and methods, as well as art in general. This has included invitations as a panelist at Joliet Junior College and North Central College. She has also been a guest artist lecturer at Roosevelt University, Chicago; an exhibiting artist lecturer at Harper College, Palatine; and at Borders Book Store on Michigan Avenue, Chicago, as well as being an invited speaker at various art organizations. She and her work have been featured in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Daily Herald, as well as other print media. Her work was also featured on NBC Channel 5 news.
Ms. Luberda’s education includes a BA in Studio Art, an Associate’s degree in Design and Illustration, specialized instruction in ceramic sculpture from the Art Institute of Chicago, fiber sculpture at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, mold making at San Antonio Institute of Art, San Antonio, Texas, and patination at Cleveland University, Cleveland, Ohio.
I have wanted to explore the complicated layers of our collective humanity through one of our most important senses, touch. This focus on the subject of touch led me to the realization that we humans are in fact “out of touch.” Invisible barriers are being erected as a consequence of an increased awareness of the emotional and physical disconnect we are experiencing.
This disconnect is heightened by fear. Ironically, we struggle to accept, compromise and trust as the chasm between “us” and “the others” broadens. Yet our innate compassion can overcome our disconnect and many of the “us” can and do get beyond that which separates the “others.”
Our hands provide the means by which we express ourselves through physical engagement in the world. With them we are able to create amazing structures, write prose and poetry, express visual ideas, make music, comfort through touch and communicate in a myriad of ways what we are inspired by and love as well as what we find loathsome and intolerable. In order to bring about positive change it is the personal responsibility of each of us to be mindful of how we use our hands in our interactions with this precious world because we hold in them the power to destroy as well as to create.
With these hand-built sculptures I hope to reveal our common connections and, most importantly our basic empathy toward one another. We can strive to be supportive of each other by working to recognize, honor, and respect the common threads of our humanity.
https://www.exhibizone.com/out-of-touch-exhibition
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