If my body is a form, and the earth the space that contains it, can I conceive of myself as part of the landscape, of that land that forms the ground I inhabit? Are we truly speaking of two separate entities or materialities? Are she and I the same? Can identity be translated into form, body, map, or territory? Can territory be understood as a body—or vice versa?

​​​

This exhibition emerges from these reflections, in which I explore poetic activations through expanded ceramics and the combination of materials. In one of the actions from Body-Territory, I trace a drawing of my body using strips of clay—referencing manual construction methods used in ceramics—so that in shaping my silhouette, I construct myself as a vessel. Meanwhile, in the series Returning the Earth to the Mountain, I recover discarded tiles to intervene them with various local and industrial clays, small gestures in which dust and sand symbolically return to their place of origin—the mountain.​

​

Through these and other ceramic-graphic actions, and through the exchange of ephemeral forms in paper, plaster molds, and mirrors, “remnant-sculptures” are created: accumulations of memories that intermittently inhabit matter, landscape, body, and context. They claim recognition for ancestral knowledge, such as that of pottery—where the mystical, the mythical, and the mud, the relationship between body and environment, are understood as a whole.

 

 

Ana Gómez

 

 

Curated by Selma Guisande