Vestments in Time
This project consists of five freestanding sculptures and nine wall pieces. The sculptures are figurative, life-sized, fleshy, corporeal forms, painted to mime bronze memorials. They are in a state of transformation, dredging up a multiplicity of faces each with its own history and path. Each face, each mouth, each eye, stands in for a life that has come before us and that is responsible for some small part of our current circumstances. These sculptures reimagine the ways in which bodies can carry and hold their ancestors as they themselves move through life.
I am marked by my formative years in Cuba; formative years that inform my relationship to materials, living and non-living bodies and the relationships they inspire. The moment I left Cuba I became a migrating body. The action of leaving, of exiting, the removal of my body from a physical place, forever defines me as other: other at the point of origin and other at points of arrival. For that reason, I am intrigued by the ways in which our bodies navigate different environments. Additionally, I am interested in how we make ourselves or parts of ourselves seen or unseen and how our environment imposes its own prescribed notions of what is visible or invisible.
My interest in textiles lies in their development as a technology that allows for quick adaptation to the physical and psychological places that we either occupy or pass through. By fashioning a second skin that mediates the experience between our vulnerable bodies and the physical conditions of our environment we can protect, but also hide, conceal and even restrain ourselves. As an outer layer, skins are simultaneously the first point of contact that the environment has with the body, and the last layer where things are felt by said body. There is a constant flow of information, energy and particles regulated by this second skin. Things come in but they also come out.
Textiles contain a tremendous amount of information. They can build and disseminate knowledge beyond the established academic framework. In making textiles we tell stories, recount histories, record information and build relationships amongst people in a certain material culture. Information can be stored in the interlacements, in the color, in the material, or in its intended use. Textiles in my work are a man-made skin, a skin that exists in multiple stages. We grow new skins in response to a new unfamiliar environment, but the old skins remain. Sometimes the old skins merge with the new ones. Sometimes they are covered, sometimes so much time passes that they fossilize. The form that these skins take at various stages may look like fiber, woven planes or hardened folds. The state of resemblance or abstraction of the body indicates an aging or calcifying process as the memories and the information that these skins carry fuse into our sense of self. Woven, knitted and braided fibers retain their flexibility. They are growing, expanding, reaching outwards. The limbs of the sculpture are thus representative of conflicting states of growth and stagnation.
In the sculptural pieces, skins are calcified as they take on a metallic sheen and adopt the inherent value ascribed to gold and bronze. They become monuments, commemorative bodies with intrinsic value and esteem. Recurring motifs speak of multiplicity and cyclical repetition. The knot is depicted in this body of work in various degrees of representation. There is the actual knot that can still be undone, there is the ossified knot in the form of a bead and then there is the memory of a knot in the form of a dot or a circle. Knots continue to be markers in my work. They represent a problem, an event or a notable point in place and time. They are a complication, an entanglement, a disruption, yet they also embellish and adorn. The painted surfaces thus become coded with points of disruption and points of continuity, opposing forces that cover the surfaces of the hardened skins. Difficulty and complexity are embedded on these second skins and proudly exposed at various stages in these sculptures.
In conclusion, this body of work embraces the uncertainty of life to shape a future that celebrates complicated, multifaceted, and contradictory bodies and the histories they contain. In a present defined by fragmented histories, these bodies grow new skins to fill in the voids created by an overwhelming number of unanswerable questions about our lives and stories as we move through new physical and psychological spaces.
