Intraterrene, 2022
Teresa Solar
Courtesy: the artist and Travesia Cuatro
Collection
Watercolor and ink on paper
76.5 x 57 cm
Teresa Solar (b. 1985, Madrid, Spain) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring multi-layered narratives with a focus on sculpture and drawing. Concerned with language and thoughts, with mouths, organs, pipes, and what can emerge and ooze out — Solar’s artistic production is immersed in sensory manifestation and morphological investigations. With Intraterrene (Inland), Solar presents a biomorphic shape using yellow watercolour and finely drawn, textural black ink on paper. As the title suggests, Solar considers the interior and the exterior. Dynamics of borders being crossed — whether this be in the greater idea of land and territory or in the sense of the body and what can move from the inside or ‘inland’ to the outside and vice versa. Is this a single form or are these separate forms? Is the black shape penetrating the yellow, or is it emerging?
The idea of connectivity abounds in Solar’s work — she draws parallels and oppositions between her own body and its narratives (stuttering, injury, daily movements through space) and wider stories in contemporary society. The macro and micro collide, coagulate. In the Crushed by Pressure (2017) series, fleshy pink ceramics thrown in organic forms are compressed between metal poles and held with elastic cord — presented alongside video, drawing and photography, Solar brings together unrelated moments of fracture and generates a dialogue. Moments such as the fake gestures made by sign language interpreter Thamsanqa Jantjie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial in 2013; Solar’s knee ligament injury; and the space shuttle Columbia’s destruction in 2003. Similarly, Solar is interested in the transformation of matter and plays with the dichotomy of manmade and natural substances — seeking to create transition and subvert notions of natural hierarchies and humanism. For Solar, lines between self and other, object and subject are continually obscured.
76.5 x 57 cm
Teresa Solar (b. 1985, Madrid, Spain) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring multi-layered narratives with a focus on sculpture and drawing. Concerned with language and thoughts, with mouths, organs, pipes, and what can emerge and ooze out — Solar’s artistic production is immersed in sensory manifestation and morphological investigations. With Intraterrene (Inland), Solar presents a biomorphic shape using yellow watercolour and finely drawn, textural black ink on paper. As the title suggests, Solar considers the interior and the exterior. Dynamics of borders being crossed — whether this be in the greater idea of land and territory or in the sense of the body and what can move from the inside or ‘inland’ to the outside and vice versa. Is this a single form or are these separate forms? Is the black shape penetrating the yellow, or is it emerging?
The idea of connectivity abounds in Solar’s work — she draws parallels and oppositions between her own body and its narratives (stuttering, injury, daily movements through space) and wider stories in contemporary society. The macro and micro collide, coagulate. In the Crushed by Pressure (2017) series, fleshy pink ceramics thrown in organic forms are compressed between metal poles and held with elastic cord — presented alongside video, drawing and photography, Solar brings together unrelated moments of fracture and generates a dialogue. Moments such as the fake gestures made by sign language interpreter Thamsanqa Jantjie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial in 2013; Solar’s knee ligament injury; and the space shuttle Columbia’s destruction in 2003. Similarly, Solar is interested in the transformation of matter and plays with the dichotomy of manmade and natural substances — seeking to create transition and subvert notions of natural hierarchies and humanism. For Solar, lines between self and other, object and subject are continually obscured.
Teresa Solar works across sculpture, video, drawing and photography. Her audio-visual practice has been mostly focused on language, translation, and the construction of meaning. These topics remain at the core of her practice, but nowadays they are tackled mainly through sculpture. The tactile quality is fundamental in the artist’s sculptural practice, which focuses mainly on ceramics but also includes materials like fabric or metal.
The daughter of a Spanish father and an Egyptian mother, Solar speaks Arabic, but she can’t read or write it, and this circumstance has greatly imbued her work, in which everything is a game with transit, language and its changing translation processes. The cultural and linguistic implications of her dual identity are palpable in her work as she constantly explores the transformation of matter, her objects constituting a hybrid between the manmade, the natural and the mythical.
The daughter of a Spanish father and an Egyptian mother, Solar speaks Arabic, but she can’t read or write it, and this circumstance has greatly imbued her work, in which everything is a game with transit, language and its changing translation processes. The cultural and linguistic implications of her dual identity are palpable in her work as she constantly explores the transformation of matter, her objects constituting a hybrid between the manmade, the natural and the mythical.