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BOXES beyond borders

Category: Ecuador

The Mummified Stone Heart

The central focus is a very special stone heart found on the Pacific coast at the equator. It has an uncommon green color. a heart with many scars. Once it was split, but love was able to hold it together and unify what had been separated.

Sorrow leaves wounds; joy brings peace.
This heart has found its peace.
Its wounds have healed.
The purpose of life was fulfilled; the eternal cycle of birth to life and death to a new life.
This heart has been embalmed; first if has been cleaned from all perishables.
The nucleus remained, one with the nature.
For women all over the world and over all times it might be a symbol for love;
isn’t the woman love’s keeper?
Love is immortal.
Faith and hope in the victory of love might be the symbol of humankind in the next millennium.

NOTE: This embalmed heart has been wrapped with golden ribbons, placed on a plate of slate from the Andes, and bedded in a stone sarcophagus.  The feather of a white swan symbolizes the purity of the heart.  As grave goods, there are two sealed papyrus rolls perpetuating the heart’s qualities. This project contains symbols from four different continents (America, Asia, Europe, Africa).

Untitled

Irony rescues the idea from remaining in an abstract area so it can transform itself into fact, mobility, into continuous experience.  This is the basic idea behind my work.

Taking apart the governmental apparatus in which the situation of the woman is always in the background; the critical observation of the external is accompanied by the capacity of my own recognition.  Then the work surges from a free montage of connections of images and thoughts.

Couple

When two do not recognize their internal forces they remain prisoners of their facade and they add this facade to the other.  Thus inevitably they will be attached to each other by an intricate chain, forgetting their own space, staying knotted and desperately isolated.

Untitled

This contribution has the intention of respecting the original box in its form and functionality. The dear box brings important and meaningful images to my mind. It can be said that I collect shapes of different character and dimension. At times my sculptures are developed from one of these shapes. Today I have put together a number of them as protagonists of our origin, our roots: an exuberant treasure that all of us can return to.

Parir Me Quiero

My work is completely visceral. Each work or piece that I create is born from an experience or event that has marked my life. For me it holds the meaning of a ritual of celebration, offering, thankfulness or prayer. In this sense I believe that it is profoundly religious. It is my way of struggling with the world, of transforming myself into a “Cleansed One.*”

*Shamanic rite to remove the physical or spiritual evil from one’s person.

Just A Tear

The box: the everyday object is used in different ways. It is taken out of its specific context in order to become an object that is artistic, cultured, of utilitarian adornment.

In this case the change is taken from a philosophical, conceptual foundation. To accept this transformation from a common, everyday object for purposes of exhibition, it is necessary to take on the challenge of new shapes and ideas, to comprehend their true structure in order to give it symbolism and a distinct visual representation: a confrontation between form and action, between reality and idea. This is to say, the object must be viewed from another angle in order to break the established canons. This shall be the philosophical stance for my work.

My subject is tears. I began with an incision between the warmth and gentleness of the wood sharply contrasted against the rigidity and coldness of the metal exterior, in order to place, in its delicate interior, a tear.

Tears are shed daily; they are commonplace and become relics when taken out of their context, just as the crusaders brought back relics from the Holy Land: pieces from the cross, from the crown of thorns, from the robe, from the nails. These amulets, upon being sacrificed, acquire properties of protection for those who hold them.

This syncretism happens in the Americas, lands which we carry deep within ourselves from the cultures of our origin and the influence of the Christian religion brought over by the Europeans.