Statement of Work
The key aim of my artwork is to investigate how the use of fragments, ephemeral objects, and archive material connects to traumatic experience, particularly in periods of social crisis.
By asking myself what I can do with the past, I look at the possibility of exploring how artworks with social and political meaning might assist communication in activating the viewer and opening their own potential.
Similar to those who are traumatised, I needed to understand my past in order to reclaim the present and the future. Therefore, an understanding of psychological trauma begins with rediscovering history. I have finally understood that as an art practitioner I have placed myself in an exile's position; to experience and reconstruct history, through my artwork and writing, with the aim of understanding the present. In my installations I have opened up spaces of communication between trauma and the collage-montage I use, in a historical context. They are my fort-da games in a room that turns into a theatrical set, inviting the viewers to see a performance without performer, to become part of this theatre. The images from the past operate like ghosts and shadows in a space without specific time, they are fragments of reality. I am presenting extreme theatre: extreme scenarios. I explore the hypothesis that it is in the vulnerability of human beings, the state of being ‘at risk’ that allows for real communication.
In my work I use the technique of cutting as a sculptural method in a therapeutic context with the aim to repair emotions through the body’s action, movement, limits, and interaction with the materials. The act of cutting in sculpture is a symbolic metabolism which transforms the materials, the fragments into something else. A large part of my work concerns the ephemeral; my installations are either dismantled after exhibiting or I re-use them for other artworks. In this way I sculpt, as an artist, my work and my identity
Rethinking the existence of materials and tools, looking at the process of making, I find connections between the relational objects (the art objects in therapeutic process), and their communication with the viewer.