OPEN THE SOUL María Sánchez 03.11 - 09.12.22

OPEN THE SOUL

Sometimes, the course of life leads us to lock the soul in dark corners and a simple fallen leaf can become the key to find it.

Connected and Invented Landscapes arise from that found leaf, from the love, affection and friendship that surrounded me at a crucial moment in my life, giving me a renewed desire to create, transmitting everything that a reconstructed soul can express. They have become a new language with which to talk about life. Through natural elements taken out of context or conceptual sculptural compositions, I describe places, actions, feelings and concepts that fill our lives.

Through these new elements in my creative process, I will continue looking for what I have always wanted: pouring my soul into each work to convey emotions to the viewer who contemplates it and without whom it would not be finished.

connected

If I have to talk about our life in these times, perhaps I would stay with two concepts: socialization and communication. These constitute a basic need of the human being and have become palpably evident over the years, since in times of pressure the power of adaptation, ingenuity and creativity emerge stronger.

We have felt connected or disconnected in a paralyzed global world, where the possibilities of communication and socialization have been subject not only to technical or economic means, but also to family, residential, mental or sentimental ones. In short, we reinvented the world circumscribed in our home, made new connections and strengthened or lost the usual ones.

And throughout this process, if there has been a new element of communication in the world, that has undoubtedly been the balcony, understood as a window, balcony or roof terrace. Music, applause, posters, flowers or dances, alone or in a group, studied or improvised, have been a new platform for expression and communication. This is my tribute to all those balconies that opened to a congested world to be a way of light and expression in the universal language of life.

This series of sculptures reflect worlds connected through the balconies by small wooden houses and steel wires. With these elements as a base, I try to express the sensations or moods that I have received through messages since the first days of confinement. On the other hand, the chosen materials go further, being the remains of wood and steel from the carvings and bronze sculptures that I have made in my years of profession. It is also worth paying homage to the capacity for reinvention that, like many professionals, some artists have needed when they could not access our workshops or the materials and work tools.

Invented Landscapes

Paisajes inventados is an artistic expression project that through hand embroidery aims to express through natural elements taken out of context. Each of them, leaves, flowers or seeds, have been collected from the ground, they are not perfect, they have the marks of their own history.

I play with the idea that what is small, what makes up a whole, is as important or more important than what it belongs to or is part of. Each of these elements make its existence possible. For me, this idea represents the metaphor with which to talk about life, how society, the world in which we live and the human being are united beyond mere coexistence. Each being is a small detail of global life, and each detail, whether beautiful or not, seems to go unnoticed far from the whole to which it belongs and of which it is an essential part. I want to focus on the details, on the nuances that make the space that surrounds us more real, that fill an action with value, that define a person.

Maria Sanchez Augustine