Revelation in the Bushes (2025) emerged from the artist’s research conducted in Catania, Sicily, where she traced the footsteps and iconography of St. Agatha — a patron saint marked by an extraordinary and often contradictory symbolism. In parallel, the artist investigated the phenomenon of roadside and courtyard shrines — spaces where the sacred intertwines with everyday life, and where religious gesture encounters local invention, improvisation, and craft.

Perlak’s practice explores the tensions and dialogues between Catholic aesthetics, a queer gaze, and folk and craft traditions. She works with materials gathered across various contexts: collected on the streets of Catania, found at a flea market in Bytom, or recovered from the dusty corners of her parents’ allotment shed. Together, these fragments form a multilayered fabric in which past, memory, and intimacy are woven into a new narrative.

The work was created during an art residency at the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art in Bytom, Poland, as part of the group exhibition The Queen’s Breasts Carved from Wood (6 September – 17 October 2025) curated by Agata Cukierska i Katarzyna Kalina.

From the Middle Ages to today, the figure of the female martyr has embodied the tension between suffering, holiness, and the transgression of traditional femininity. Saint Agatha’s iconography — often showing her with her severed breasts — is one of the most vivid and ambivalent representations of the female body in Christian tradition. Her story concentrates the many meanings projected onto the body: sexuality, nourishment, desire, fear, punishment, and cultural control.

The Queen’s Breasts Carved from Wood critically reinterprets Agatha’s legend as a way to examine mechanisms of power over the female body in a phallocentric society. The breasts, central to her symbolism, become a site where identity, violence, sacrifice, and defeminisation intersect. The artists break the legend into its key elements, exploring themes such as the symbolism of the breast, the sexualisation of martyrs, and contemporary perspectives on gender, embodiment, and spirituality. Through these new readings, the exhibition situates Agatha’s story within broader discussions on the role and vulnerability of women in contemporary culture.

Co-financed by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, part of  the Culture Promotion Fund.