Juan Silió gallery presents its first solo exhibition by Núria Fuster. (M)OTHER AND ANOTHER is a project that, due to the urge to keep on creating during lockdown, she consciously gets rid of the boundaries that separate her identity as an artist and her household chores. Work-life balance reaches beyond simply combining these two independent spheres and her proposal is to accept the mutual presence of one another.
This fracture also interferes and modifies her usual work process, the materials and the forms that are used. The body appears as both a tool and a material in a series of ceramic sculptures. The represented bodies are transformed and inhabit the space in between fiction and everyday routine. A graphic series uses crumpled weekly shopping receipts as material trace of routine. These objects are intervened using a hot iron resulting into organic shapes that remind us of the spontaneity and simplicity of such small acts.
Shouting or saying something out loud can be a method to turn thought into reality, and also a cathartic act that helps accepting a life experience. The same happens when a thought is expressed through lines (written words or drawings) or the creation of shapes (created or borrowed from pre-existing ones). In a way, still for many generations, the acknowledgement of reality is done through touching or feeling the presence of such reality.
(M)OTHER AND ANOTHER is a verb. I understand this exhibition as a physical movement, a step forward after living the pandemic experience of a lockdown at home along my family. It is a statement about the link between my artistic practice and my household activities. I decide to knock down the wall separating them and establish a work-life balance that is almost therapeutical that takes me to new work processes such as ceramics and a graphic registry based on my crumpled weekly shopping receipts.
Núria shouts through her materials. Searching, re-assigning and assembling them has always been her way of reflecting and talking. We decreasingly generate less and less material traces, especially during our day-to-day mundane actions. Shopping receipts are one of the few physical registries that remain, although we do not choose to produce them. We throw them away, crumple them, lose them. But if we check them out we find a personal diary in them that displays an essential part of intimacy. The graphicbook of Mutter series captures their image and reminds us about the existence and importance of these actions, by transforming them into delicate pieces of paper – where their creases talk about the day-to-day complexity and the overlapped shapes represent a natural presence of all these registries.
Like I believe Jon Mikel Euba once said “an artist is someone who creates what is possible with what is available” . My art had to adapt to my context. I started by paying special attention to domestic behaviours and processes, such as dust accumulation, cleaning rituals, weekly grocery shopping, economy, diet, living spaces, etc. that are mostly neglected materialities from a cultural point of view. My work is based on the re-appropriation of motherhood and the invisible duality that is the art practice while also caring for the educational, general care and formation needs of new human beings. This exhibition gathers the functional aesthetic that surrounds my day-to-day routine, elaborating a body of work resulting in a fusion of my life experience as an artist, mother and housekeeper all at the same time.
There are no immutable identities. All materials and shapes coexist and blend. Breaking the boundaries limiting them also means expanding into new directions in which is possible to continue with this same process. She eliminates the imposed linearity and changes paths whilst being coherent with oneself and one’s previous work. In this way, Núria Fuster resumes forgotten techniques while also facing new materials for her such as ceramics. In both cases, her body is used intuitively, letting her memory move her hand and applying the pressure of her body onto the materials. As a result, we find once again the flow between organic ans structured shapes, some of them known to the eye and some others unreal.
The duality artist-mother and mother-artist can seem simple. But it takes courage to relate in the same way in all contexts. State, process, relationship and action: (M)OTHER AND ANOTHER is a verb. We just need an involuntary sign of a crumpled shopping receipt to show us there is no weakness in all this but exactly the opposite.