MA Y1 U1 Exhibition visit: Spike island – Ofelia Rodriguez

This is my second visit to this exhibition and it was a guided tour by the curator. Below are the informal notes I took on the tour. I also noted some points for personal reflection and a question I posed myself to help my search for a unique transcultural style for my practice.

Notes made during tour:

Despite using textiles and stitching for her work, she hated sewing.

Landscape as a hostile environment. Threatening to nature:

Use trim of fabric to give cultural content (like this, note – to use for my work).

Plaster for healing. Landscape suffered violence. (Like the use of plaster, resonates with me.)

Above work has plaster also. The photo was a found image of a western morality philosopher from 17th-18th century. It was a photo she found in Times magazine and she felt the irony for the damage that had been done to the world.

Then her work changed to flatter colours. Started to bring in her hands (holding onto something) and ears:

Above is a surrealist box. Note – like the idea of using a box to tell stories. Could use HK letter boxes with family photos. I can write letters or just have an envelope addressed to my family.

Idea – use my hand as image to reach out to my brother’s hand and tea in a piece of work that I had done recently.

Idea – use biology picture of heart, to take out the emotions of a symbolic ‘red heart’. A biological heart is symbolic for me.

Boxes:

More plaster denoting healing wound in the violence in Latin America. Columbia being attacked, with God’s watchful eye (at the bottom). Bleeding heart is used a lot in her work:

Boxes bringing objects together trying to provoke conversation, with objects found in street market:

Boxes are like shrines or alters.

REFLECTIONS – some captured within notes.

Question: (to be answered)

What makes her style her style? Look at this series of work and analyse the elements that make her style unique and recognisable, then think how those points would apply to my style development.