Carolina Aguirre

Carolina Aguirre’s mythopoetic works question the experience of belonging as it relates to location, nature, and otherness. Belonging is chosen as an embodied and emotional access point to wider themes of environmentalism and identity politics resulting from mobility. The interdisciplinary practice incorporates painting, video, sculpture and performance and is guided by materiality, spirituality, and tenderness.

The painting process, which forms the foundation of the practice, feels both archeological and psychoanalytical. On the floor, the painting becomes an environment which is watered, dug and walked around. Materials like sumi ink, shellac, charcoal and natural pigments earth the paintings further. Mythical, instinctual, and ambiguous narratives materialise out of political concerns and muddier inner worlds. The scenes play out on aerial landscapes that allude to land as seen from a flight home, or browsed longingly on google maps. Birds, which feature often, also see land in this way. Here there is no hierarchy between plants, animals, symbols, and humans. Most recently, the incorporation of body imprints serve as metaphor of the territorialised body and act as presence through absence (joining an artistic tradition that dates back to Palaeolithic cave paintings).