I’m an artist and co-owner of Desperate Literature bookshop, Madrid.
My early work was heavily influenced by my time spent with books, being interested in how we move from word to body and back, with mark-making leading to writing. If my works did not quite become ‘painting-poems’, it is rather because my interest in text is focused at the point in which the hand-written or scrawled word breaks down from signifier to abstract mark. I often pushed paintings to the point of the chaotic, losing coherence in form and colour, before trying to drag them back or, regularly enough, having to throw them out.
This focus on layered abstraction, usually applied to found objects, was the foundation of my more recent work with concrete, a material that is as equally overlooked as it is encountered in our daily lives. Much beyond its artistic use in Brutalism, concrete offers a rich flexibility of movement and finish that I am interesting in exploring, along with all the economic, social and moral contradictions it embodies in the industrial world.
My works continue to incorporate found ‘natural’ materials such as bark, soil, fallen petals, pollen and most recently lichen. These can be ground into powders or steeped into pastes before being used, but there is a purposeful frustration in making marks that either fail fully to take to a surface, do not apply evenly, or rub off immediately.
My most recent project, Viriditas, is ongoing at The Lab of Experimental Art (LEA), Madrid. Viriditas is a term taken from the mediaeval Benedictine saint, Hildegard Von Bingen, and the project emerged from what I see as a continued and sustained contradiction at the heart of my practice, and perhaps my life. On the one hand, a tension within the materiality of my work (the use of non-human alongside man-made materials) and the time-scales of my practice (human/non-human), and on the other hand, a tension between my deep interest in attempting to be present in my body (and to be alive to the gratitude and joy of the art making process) and my state/s as a nervous city-dweller, too-often distracted, self-distracting, somebody caught in the day-to-day rush of getting by. This is not a simple tension between stillness and activity, but the desires engendered by the two, both generative and conflictive.
My writing has appeared in The London Magazine and 3:AM Magazine.
If you’re interested in knowing more about Desperate Literature and our many exploits, click here.
RECENT SHOW:
UVNT, 2024. Madrid
Between the Greenbelt and the Rest
40 concrete pieces
ACQUIRED by La Fundación Carmen & Lluís Bassat
