CóncavoMaría García Ibáñez

Entrevista a María García Ibáñez

por Ana RobledilloTraducción Álvaro Muñoz

Why Cóncavo (Concave)?

Cóncavo refers to an excavation in the territory, to a hole in the ground, a container.

The series of pieces I present in the gallery are an almost inevitable re-sult of the work started in my previous exposure Arada, and possibly a second “chapter” of a larger whole, although some of them had already been planned for some time, so I believe that in Cóncavo many of my interest converge and are synthesized.

No Title. Concave Series, 2015. Videoinstalation 4´40. Edition 3. Instalation view in Paula Alonso gallery, Madrid.

Gallery View. Cóncavo by María García Ibañez. Paula Alonso Gallery. Madrid. Septiembre 2015.

How has your work evolved since your last exhibition “Arada”? “Cóncavo” manifests a tendency to geometry that is unusual to date in your work, where organic form had predominated.

Everything comes from the figure of the “petate”, a central american handmade carpet that can be folded, which is used to stay protected from the harshness of the ground, to eat, to give birth and in the old ti-mes as a shroud whenz death came. In Arada, which means “the amount of land that can be ploughed by a man in a day’s work”, I used this everyday item considering it as the smallest unit of a possible imaginable nomadic dwelling, a “possession” of the land, reduced to no more than the own human scale.

In Concave this dimension is projected on the ground and unfolds towards the three dimensional plane; it sinks into the ground taking the schema-tic shape of the excavation, a hole in a figured surface, through a syn-thetic, specific geometry, exposing a subfloor that shows the geological horizons, strata accumulated in a sectioned ground.

Petate, 2015. From Arada Series. White cement mold. 120X70 cm.

Drawing is an essential part of your artistic research. The line –which determines your drawing- transmuted, grows, contracts, appears and desapears with eeach new project. And not just that; though it the drawing expands to other materials.

Drawing is essential, the basis of all my work. All my projects are cons-tructed taking it as a starting point, not only in the sense of sketching or planning from the paper. For me its natural for my ideas to start solidi-fying from my disoriented drawings, from an almost playful aspect that progressively gains sense afterwards.

John Berger summarizes this first approach to drawing in very simple words: “For the artist drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual art of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind´s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations.”

In Arada drawing and weaving were linked to the land by the “petate´s” demarcation, as a line drawn on the ground, resulting in a limited area and also a trace. In some cases I used similar methods to those used in archeology, such as the “frottage” or direct molds, which allow to obtain printouts of shapes and also to capture remains of the passing of time. I also performed drawings in pencil, watercolor and gouache; slow and laborious drawings, some of them resemble, in their cumulative cons-truction, the fabrics made on a loom.

However, the proposal in “Concave” is clearly geometrical, and con-cepts of time and space are treated in a deeper and more synthetic way.

As you mentioned, different materials coexist in the show but it’s purely a show about designing, even not being the paper the format in all cases.

Loom. Cóncavo Series. 2015. Wool, Hand made loo. 244X61 cm.

As an example, with the textile piece, made with black wool in a hori-zontal loom, I intended for the energy of the design to overcome the texture of the material, so that the perception of form could anticipate the time and complications of the manufacturing.

It’s interesting how you incorporate elements from tradition such as ceramics and tex-tiles to the design.

Yes, I am very interested in traditional handmade arts and for a long time I’ve been using ceramics, a fascinating world in many ways, with an inherent ancestral and telluric component, which adds a unique value to it. It is surprising that a material like clay, after being handled, can end up being a rock through fire. As if we could accelerate a natural trans-formation of thousands of years. It’s this sense of solidity and perpetuity that I find captivating.Regarding the textile techniques I’ve had many opportunities to work with them, but until now I couldn’t find a coherent proposal for them to be used that didn’t end up in just a mere design for a loom. However, this time, the dialogue between the concept, the design and method is balanced; none raises his voice over the other, making it one of the most categorical parts of the exhibition.

No title. Arada Series, 20015. Gouache and watercolor on paper. 109x72 cm.

Giuseppe Penone said that when the hand digs into the soil, an empyness is created where the hand has been; the soil gets mixed and the sculpture takes shape.

Which is your relationship with sculpture? During the production I was suggested a book that became revealing: “To be a skull” by Georges Didi-Huberman, which develops the idea of the sculpting based on the fact of space, a hollow cavity. Each of the es-says that form that work reflects on volume as something almost tactile, imprecise and organic at the same time.

Most of the pieces have a strong sculptural character. They could be designs for future three-dimensional shapes, but I wanted to stay there and reflect on it from the graph.

In Concave we can find cavities, reversible forms, like it happens in the diptych Holes; drawings that either are holes, forms, or fit inside each other. The series of pencil drawings Baskets addresses the volume from a very different perspective, representing a sample of the different ways to start and end hand made palm baskets, which will become finished containers.

From Tierras Continuas Series, 2014. Ceramics and Glass. 18x12cm approx.

Variations of an hexagon Series, 2014. Inked glass plates. 300x200 cm. 2014. Variations of an hexagon Series, glass rods welde d. 160x100cm approx.

You present us something distinctly human in “Concave”. In your work the human form is missing. Nevertheless it’s like its non-presence determines an invisible dialogue between viewer and piece.

It’s true, there is an absence of the human form, but everything refers to man. Either way in my work he is always present, even in the distance, because he is, in the end, the benchmark on which everything revolves.

In this sense, the text Juan Cardenas wrote for the show In the madiguera, zvKafka revisited hits the target. Although my work has nothing kafkaes-que, or psychological, he decided to use two characters dialoguing to approach it with a narration, a story with a beginning and an ending that I think complements the absence of “humanness” in my work, but seen from literature.

Reading it I immediately recognized the fiction of that hole-digging mo-le-man, running from who knows what and who knows who. At the time I took some notes; it’s a deep, anguishing and unfinished story, which we curiously never talk about. And now I find It again, loaded with a new meaning.

Apuntes para una Madriguera Series(Issue 1), 2013. 500 industrial glazed bricks. Different measures.

What does it mean for you “to belong”? The concept of “belonging” is key to your work together with “source” and “territory”.

I have spent many years abroad, coming and going, and it has inevitably made me think about the idea of displacement, migration and origin. Belonging, owning a place, is something that is created, it happens, but in that journey, procedence is also revealed, and that is for me the big turning point, because then a search for self-placement necessarily ari-ses, for a model, not only social or historical, but more elementary or primary, related to the body, to scale, to landscape, to the composition of organic structures. In the end it comes to trying to understand where I am, within a movement.

I like the term used by Nicolas Bourriaud in his book, Radicant, which are a type of plants whose roots move and adapt to the type of soil they inhabit: movable roots. In his essay uses the metaphor of the “radicant” to refer to art and contemporary artists. The “radicant” individual can get away from his roots and adapt. “There is no such thing as a unique origin, but a series of simultaneous or mixed settlings”, so self identity moves and is replanted in new soil, accepting a continued and natural transformation. Apart from the specific issues addressed, I find it a very clear image to explain what I mentioned earlier.

Tierras Continuas Series, 2014.Digital printing and fabric collage. 70x50 cm. Series of 10 drawings.

Tierras Continuas Series, 2014. Laser-cut fabric. 170x160cmv

Tierras continuas Series, 2014. Laser-cut fabric. 120x110cm

Landscape, maps, nature, body .... Why the need for mapping?

Mapping has occasionally become a working method, which is helpful for me to get oriented, to find anchoring points and in this way organi-ze my environment. It’s about launching waves, like bats do; waves that bounce off objects and bring data that is stored and that after a while, sooner or later, finds its own connections.

The scale is fundamental to make a map. Thinking about that “connec-tion storage”, Im very interested in mapping as a way to oppose or bring realities together. For example, in the “bones / stones / flowers” project, I used classical prints of anatomy, isolating parts and drawing over them with watercolor or pencils, turning them into kind of landscapes, so body and nature inverted their proportions and a histological section resembled earth showing its stratigraphic layers.

In Micrographia instead, I based myself on the homonymous book the scientist Robert Hooke wrote in 1665: a compendium of illustrations of the first microscopic and telescopic observations, where the word “cell” is mentioned for the first time in history. Among other things, it made me think of the impact that these findings had, and how they made the meaning of scale and the human dimension burst.

Finally, I think that the need to map you have mentioned is simply a need to understand, to satisfy curiosity about things, which is what gi-ves meaning to the work I do and what fuels the excitement for further research.

Inmóviles, 2012. Glazed Ceramics, polychrome and gold. 80x15 cm approx.

From Bones/Stones/Flowers Series(2,6), 2011. Inverted digital print watercolor on paper, 70x50cm.

If you had to choose between experience and intuition in the artist, what would be your answer?

It makes no sense for me to choose one or the other, I do not trust in-tuition without experience, or experience without intuition; I think that both concepts should feed each other to be able to grow, or at least it should be like that most of the time.

From Micrography Series, 2013. Color pencil and laser cutted paper. 100x50cm.

From Micrography Series. Glazed ceramic, 280x200 cm. approx.

From Micrography Series, 2013. Laser cutted paper 150x90cm.

From Apuntes de una Madriguera Series (edition 3) 2014. 500 industrial glazed bricks. Different sizes.

María García-IbáñezMadrid, 1978.

María García Ibáñez’s recent projects and exhibitions include: Anamnesis (with Javier León Perez at Puerta Roja Gallery, Hong Kong, 2106), Cóncavo ( Solo show at Galería Paula Alonso, Madrid, 2015), Arada (Solo show at Guijarro de Pablo, Mexico City, 2015), Fühlst du nicht an meinen liedern dass ich eins und doppelt bin (Collective show at Gallery Peter Kilchmann, Suitzerland, 2015), Tierras Continuas (Solo show at AJG Gallery, Sevilla, 2014), The prehistory of the Image (STUK Center, Bélgica, 2014), Re-collective (Solo show at Galeria Puerta Roja, Hong Kong, 2014), Ruta Mística (Museo MARCO, Monterrey, México, 2013) Micrographia (Solo show at Puerta Roja & Cat Street Gallery. Hong Kong, 2013), Apuntes para una madriguera (Solo show at Misce-lánea, México DF, 2012).She obtained different grants like Production Grant for International Exhibitions C12 (Oaxaca,México, 2012), International Fellowship for artists (Spanish Ministry of Cul-ture, Spain, 2012), Grant C11 (Oaxaca, México, 2011), Residence Program for Latin American artists in México (AECID, CONACULTA, FONCA, 2009), International Fellowship for artists (Matadero. Contemporary Art Center Madrid. Spain, 2008), In-ternational Grant for artists (Spanishzz Ministry of Culture. Spain, 2008).

www.mariagarciaibanez.comz