My proposal for Narcís Monturiol high school revolves around a basic artistic topic: the idea of “landscape”. This concept, as simple and familiar as it may seem, is the starting point for reflection on language in its written and oral forms. This leads us to the representative origin of written signs, seeing image and text parallel to each other. After a process of free experimentation with letters, words and verse to discover poetry as a toSol for expression, we will return to the idea of landscape in order to broaden its representative limits. We will then create a work of art to see a subjective reinterpretation of this topic by looking at texts as conceptual brushstrokes. In this process, we will transform literal representations of reality into a literary projection to better understand the concept of metaphor as an intrinsic part of our creative work.

Mar Arza

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Triptych: manila paper, seawater, cut-out words, net, sand, all glued on wood, 300 x 120 cm.

Peixos d’estima [Love fish] is a sculptural-pictorial triptych that presents a meditation on the relationship between landscape and writing through brushstrokes featuring words cut out from second-hand books that form poetic phrases that link emotion to the world of the sea and fishing. The words swim against a background made from paper treated with seawater

The triptych Peixos d’estima [Love fish] portrays a sinuous, wavy coming and going of feeling in three phases of differing intensity.

The white pulp of the Manila hemp fibres weaves a textured white sea with the imprint of the net and the memory of foam. The toasted pulp of the other pages (cut out from second-hand books) portrays an island of calm in the middle of this imaginary landscape scattered with short poems. A silhouette, a school of potential love-fish seeking the sieve of reading that will encompass and order them.

A contrast of tones that finds balance in the cut-outs scattered throughout to form the most beautiful phrases, the result of the industrious, chance, and in all cases patient work of all the hands and minds that took part in the project.

The handmade nature of the paper provided the key to creating this random scenery in which phrases could be salvaged from the immensity of the vocabulary, in which writing represents selection from the a sea of words at hand. The net (literal and metaphorical) entails the salvaging of the paper pulp dispersed in the seawater along with the selection of words, like a sieve saves them from oblivion.

The key phrase, “love-fish”, is found in a third piece, like a reminder of all that which, like a fishhook, attaches us to life.

The work-in-progress can be followed at the creative process site or on the iN RESiDENCE blog (in Catalan).