CASITA!

About

In proposing this title, it is not clear whether Marta Zelaia (Urdúliz, ES 1962) is opening the doors to her home, inviting us into an entrenched, intimate and personal space, or if she is seeking shelter and protection from the external world in it.

Open and closed, referred to since psychoanalysis as a feminine spatial category. People, memories; the family history remains static within the walls of home, of the temple: births and deaths, joy and sorrow, the battles lost and won. Sometimes a stone refusing penetration.

The artist reveals in every piece of this exhibition a character of intimacy associated to her roots, to a different way of observing the near environment from her role as a woman, as a significant part of the family, the one who preserves and perpetuates traditions and memories however complicated this may often turn out. The way she understands the term home, not only as a container, but as an affective internal space, intertwined with the cultural and political history, with the conversations and events that impregnate the walls, sometimes contradicting one’s own cultural framework, or a human need for expansion, abundance and comfort.

Marta has a strong connection with all the materials she uses, they hold the similar symbolic meaning of mother and father. The woods of fruit trees, the canvas, the cotton, the paper have all been selected in the intimate surroundings, in the land, because they reveal a natural beauty, and they can be articulated in an intimate and manual construction process sawing, braiding, carefully caressing the surfaces. Those who work the land do not look at nature as a beautiful picture, yet they may be deeply conscious of her beauty.  These words by Yi-Fu Tuan explain the way the artist looks around her. Her surroundings, her reality will be the tool to look at the world and to situate herself in art and in the land.

In conclusion, in a recent reading of her work, the artist says: in spite of having begun this series in 2019, today The Home acquires a broader dimension, confined as we are since the arrival of the pandemic that plagues us. Again, context and time transform the narrative of past work and expressions, as well as the way to approach the refuge, the temple, the land and the art.