Did I say I miss you? (Bilbao)

The work I am presenting in the studio space is an adaptation of an exhibition with the same title I had last summer at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in Dublin. I started off from a drawing based on a written description of the inside of a tiny room with a door opening onto the galleryin Dublin. Inside it there was nothing but light switches, the closed-circuit system and cleaning products. The effort of imagining the space from the meticulous text that Michael Hill, the exhibition’s curator, had sent to me and the attempt to represent it in a drawing, was my way of foreclosing the impulse to explore my affective relationship with Dublin or any history associated with the site. And so, in this way, the main sculpture, made from bramble branches collected in Artxanda, established a certain distance from the Irish art centre and its audience, in contrast to the insect drawings, which sought to appeal directly to visitors. Now, here in Bilbao, I believe those distances are reversed and are inevitably shorter. I live here, and I produced the work with the help of friends, recovering and integrating a vague memory of forms belonging to another work that can also be traced back to this place some years ago, when I was just beginning to get to know it.

For some time now, I have been trying to speak about my own work in this reductive and highly technical way, commenting on and sometimes delving a little deeper into the role that distance has played in each case. Interpreting myself and communicating like this helps to put my mind at ease.

At the same time, the point of departure for the series I am presenting in the corridor space was the idea of changing scale and reproducing religious medals and pendants by observing them through a magnifying glass, initially with the idea of bringing them closer to the stone figures carved on the façades of churches. By means of this device, which also implies distance on my behalf, I could somehow counteract the strange feeling of realising that for a large part of my life I have worn the miniature representation of strangers around my neck.

The structure of Did I say I miss you? was produced by the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. The ironwork is by Adrián Castañeda.

The series Impulso que estás dentro, sal de mi cuerpo was produced in the Iturribide Etxeagarden, with the support of Caniche Editorial and AC/E’s residencies programme PICE.