Carolina Aguirre

Interrogating experiences of belonging, Carolina Aguirre brings ambiguous terrains into being using a repertoire of natural inks, shellac and organic pigments. These materials coalesce on the surface of her wood supports to suggest shifting geological landscapes from which body parts and narrative clues emerge and dissolve. Misty imprints of the artist’s own body frame this entanglement of the human and natural worlds within an autoethnographic lens. Working on the floor, Aguirre likens her painting process to ‘excavating’ or ‘gardening’, at times incising directly into the wood panels to cultivate open-ended narratives that hold myriad expressions of belonging and generational memories of migration.

Aguirre’s interdisciplinary practice also includes sculpture, video and installation.

"The territorialised body makes its way into Carolina Aguirre’s semi-abstracted paintings, in which she makes use of natural pigments to explore the relationship between immigrant identity and land. Her paintings hint at human bodies and faces through a complex visual language of presence and absence. Suggesting the interconnectivity of body, identity, and place, they simultaneously resemble the contours of landscapes seen from above. Intimate and estranged, a view of a homeland accessed through a plane window or phone screen."