Cortijada Los Gazques- art residency in Spain, 28 November – 12 December 2009
The residency at Cortijada Los Gázquez has enabled me to change my perspective in terms of my practice and has given me a tremendous freedom to experiment without spatial limitation.
At the same time I felt very restricted in access to man made materials which led me to explore natural resources, found objects such as branches, dead almond tree trunks, stone and natural pigment etc…
I consider these found ‘natural’, ready-made objects had huge potential to be integrated within both outdoor and indoor installation.
I purposely decided to deprive myself of the possibility to manipulate these objects through an ‘aggressive’ human approach like the convention of cutting and carving, for example. I wanted to access a kind of primordial way of conceiving the origin of nature, of being.
Cultivation of this overwhelming landscape, together with its semi-wilderness inspired me in a process of accumulation and construction possibly as part of a constant addition to a landscape pastiche. I found a dichotomy between the concepts of nature and culture I had not considered before and it has had an enormous impact on my work during the residency at JOYA.
