Liberated ?

If everything that shaped us remains part of us, can we ever be completely free?

Barbara Puto, 2024

Can we ever be completely free from what shaped us? Discover Liberated, the final chapter of Barbara Puto’s The Construction of Freedom.

Trapped / Uwięziona
2026

Oil on canvas
70 × 50 cm
From The Construction of Freedom

Liberated ?

What does freedom look like when we cannot erase what made us who we are?

Liberated is the final painting in The Construction of Freedom, but it is not an answer.

The woman moves forward calmly. She is no longer fighting the structures that once confined her. Some have fallen away. Others have left traces. What she has lived through has not disappeared from her body, because liberation does not mean returning to some untouched version of the self.

There is no such self to return to.

We are made from relationships, memories, beliefs, wounds, desires, inherited patterns, and choices. Even when we reject something that once shaped us, the experience of having carried it remains part of our construction.

What changes is not the past.

What changes is who decides what happens next.

The figure no longer needs to tear herself away from everything that has influenced her. She can carry some traces and leave others behind. She moves without the weight of the limitations she has chosen to abandon.

But is she free?

I deliberately leave that question unanswered.

Perhaps freedom is not a final state at all. Perhaps it is the continuing ability to recognize what is acting within us, to question it, and to choose again.

Liberated does not show a woman who has escaped her construction.

It shows a woman who has begun to take authorship of it.

And perhaps that is as close to freedom as we can ever come.

I begin with a ballpoint pen sketch. The two essential elements of the painting are already present at this stage: the folded figure and the net that surrounds and penetrates her. I am searching for the relationship between the position of the body and the structure that will become a physical image of limitation.

01. First Sketch

 I transfer the sketch onto the canvas and begin building the body through color. I focus on the hunched posture, the tension in the back, and the position of the arms. The yellow drips are like traces of light that have escaped from within her. They suggest something that was once present — energy, openness, perhaps hope.

02. Building the Figure

At this stage, I begin covering the body with the net. I do not treat it as an external cage — I draw it directly across the figure so that it gradually becomes part of her surface. The limitation no longer exists only around the person; it begins to enter her own structure.

03. Covering the Body with the Net

The net spreads further across the body and becomes denser. It no longer simply surrounds the figure — it penetrates her form. The distinction between what comes from outside and what has already become part of her begins to disappear.

04. Penetration

The net wraps around the body, and the body begins to absorb it. The boundary between the figure and the structure becomes increasingly blurred. What began as an external limitation starts to become part of her own form.

05. Absorption

In the final stage, the body and the net are almost inseparable. The prison no longer needs walls — part of its structure is carried within the self. I mute the yellow drips because the light, energy, and hope have become faint. They are still present, but barely visible beneath the weight of the structure.

06. Trapped