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 spans painting, installation, sculpture and performance. The painting process, which forms the foundation of the practice, is both archeological and psychoanalytical.
On the floor, the painting becomes an environment which is watered, dug, impressed upon and walked around. Attention is given to the quality of natural materials; the mineral sheen of sumi ink, the bodily gloss of shellac, the smokiness of charcoal. Mythical, instinctual, and ambiguous, the paintings tread the line between abstraction and figuration. From afar the works could be aerial landscapes; land as seen from a flight home, or browsed longingly on google maps. They could also be close ups of rock or cross-sections of geological phenomena. Distances and borders are blurred. Body imprints allow for an even closer physical relationship between painting and artist. The imprints are reimagined so that the body disintegrates, expands or transforms. Paintings like ‘Strata’ (2024) or ‘Safe Sediment’ (2024) imagine the body in post-life or post-human futures, whereas ‘I said rock’ (2024), titled after the song Sinnerman as sung by Nina Simone, is a yearning for in-life redemption from the non-human world. In the studio, the imprint leaves a mark on the body, a ‘mancha’, which is documented.
The sculptural and installation based work follows a similar use of natural materials and blurring of boundaries. Materials used include earth, hair, human ashes, grass, metal and wood pulp. Most recently, immersive installation ‘Remember, member, ember’ (2024) at Lismore Castle Arts blurs the boundaries between building, location and artwork. Using the remoteness of the The Mill as part of the work itself, the viewer is invited into a calcified environment that feels ‘outside’ of society, suspended both physically and temporally. Time here feels slower. Audio made from the building’s stones is played back, distorted and alive. The sculptures, growing out the ground and into the roof, are somewhere between mineral and organic. Humans have a fragile yet essential relationship to this space; one of the sculptures has a heart-string made of human hair, the walls have traces of human intervention.