The village of Zaręby sits twelve kilometers northeast of Łowicz, in the flat Mazovian lowlands where the Bzura bends toward the Vistula. I first visited in January 2019, during a week of freezing fog, to meet Zofia Jarosz — at eighty-three, one of the last practicing wycinankarka who still uses sheep-shearing scissors rather than craft knives. Her cottage walls were covered, every whitewashed surface, in layered roosters cut from glossy colored paper: cochineal red over emerald over saffron, each animal slightly offset from the one beneath it.
Folding the World in Half
The fundamental gesture of wycinanki is the fold. A sheet of cheap glossy stock, bought at the village market, is folded once along its central axis. Every cut produces a mirror image — two roosters facing each other, two trees of life branching from a shared trunk, two sun rosettes radiating from a common center. This bilateral symmetry is not decorative preference but structural inevitability: the grammar of the scissors itself.
“Fold the paper once and you get two of everything. Fold it twice and you get a world.”