Supporting clouds and drawing worlds could be a way of expressing some activity played by overturning the terms of the drawing and sketches. Boosting the role of drawing becomes an active agent. The drawing tool, the charcoal, converted into support of the work, making the black spot, the drawing of its action.
I’ve been doing trees and landscapes for years, sculptures; Forms that are related to growth, light, heaven and earth. With time and memory. The landscape allows me to do an exercise in ordering and understanding since it is disorderly, asymmetric and always unknown. The tree and the cloud have built that universe: reporting clouds that look like anything. Trees fragmented in crowns, in leaves, in distinct and repeated branches; In burnt branches that give rise to other trees drawn in coal; Abstract and surprising forms, like exits from some unknown seed.
The idea of fragility is in each and every one of the works in which I am involved, an idea that seems to come from nature. Fragile materials in inconsistent compositions that endanger even ideas. The role that was always the drawing plane, turned into building material.
Parallel to these works I have developed an investigation of the forms through stone, works in relation to the myths that have allowed me to focus attention on some artists of the tradition and relate works of very different nature, from very distant times (Bernini/ Kapoor).
I understand the artistic production as a continuous development, from the first ideas, where the artist’s role is primordial, since it is he himself who provokes certain interrogations throughout the long process of accomplishment of the work, that when it escapes of its scope are lost.
Marta Linaza, 1960, Spain
She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and a degree from the same University in the specialty of Sculpture. She has been a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Salamanca and at the Felipe Felipe II-UCM de Aranjuez. She is currently a professor at the Rey Juan Carlos University in the Sculpture area. Director of the Project Integrating Contemporary Art in the Rural Environment, Outdoor Sculpture, financed by the Valdesimonte City Council, Segovia, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.
Self-financed artistic project Recompose the forest developed in Segovia with juniper wood from a fire, between 2005 and 2008; Installed in the Botanical Garden of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2009) within the exhibition Making landscape in the garden: cultivating spaces. Another botanical garden; And at the Tree’s Courtyard in the Lozoya Tower, Segovia (2009).
Coordinator of the European Sculpture Teaching program with Sculpture Network 2011/2014, and „Teachers in Practice“, a project in which 10 teachers from 7 countries and their students participated with the theme „Migrations / Thoughts on a Plate“.
She co-directed various artistic projects: Conversations with the landscape, Project endorsed by the Rey Juan Carlos University, developed at the Montenmedio Contemporary Art Foundation, 2015 and 2016.
She directed the project Conversations with the landscape # 6: Now the sky, Museo Ignacio Zuloaga, Pedraza (Segovia), 2017.
My line of research links art, landscape and territory. I have worked on different projects in relation to the territory, its resources, its memory; Perhaps the most significant by size and concept has been Recompose the Forest. This artistic activity has been presented in different congresses:
1. „Art and Territory. Conversations with the landscape in Montenmedio „. II International Conference SETED-ANTE. „State, Territory and Development“. Santiago de Compostela. ISBN: 978-84-606-9562-2.
2. CICREART2017 III International Congress of Research and Teaching of Creativity. University of Granada.
3. „Conversations with the landscape in the Coslada wetland. Third landscapes between America and Europe „. VIII International Congress of Latin America: Reviewing Paradigms, Creating Partnerships. Edita: Group of Geography of Latin America AGEAL. ISBN: 978-84-617-1632-6. DL: M 25486-2014.
4. Migrations and Racism, Building an Open and Multicultural Community. CEMIRA. Faculty of Geography and History, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, ISBN: 84-695-2469-0
5. Conversations with the landscape. I International Congress E @. Autonomous University of Madrid. ISBN: 978-84-695-2478
The interest in matter as the guiding thread of plastic research has led me to perform works of a very different nature that are closer to poetics and words than to an analysis of forms. Works around the figure of the tree are collected in the exhibitions EJEM TREE! and HUMM TREE! Both carried out in Madrid and Albacete.
The art work TIERRA DE NADIE, realized in the Montenmedio Contemporary Art Foundation, at Vejer de la Frontera, Cadiz, also has that character of experimentation and is full of resonances that relate it with procedural practices.
Parallel to these interests I have always felt a powerful interest in the role of the hand in the artistic production, which led me to do the doctoral thesis on this subject. The hand object and subject of creation: Handling tools and gesture in sculptural creation, UCM Publications Service, Madrid, ISBN 978-84-669-2883-0. „About Hands“. www.hipo-tesis.eu. ISSN: 2340-5147.
Marta Linaza