Sunday, September 4, 2022

ESTER PARTEGÀS

5 min Talk at the American Academy in Rome

General
With a varied formal vocabulary that incorporates sculpture, painting, image and text, I focus
on ubiquitous and generic objects and spaces that mediate our daily lives. Residues of human
interactions like plastic bags, food packaging and supermarket receipts serve me to explore a
dynamic and unstable space that simultaneously celebrates and mourns the given tenets of
contemporary culture. Shortening the distance between humans and objects, with my work I
am trying to find a communal and more profound place that I belief exists for both.

Laundry Baskets
For the last few years, I have been focusing on a series of sculptures that take as a starting
point the familiar dollar-store laundry basket. Approaching the basket more like a historically
designated space of specific characteristics rather than a commodity, for example, brought me
to the understanding of the basket as a kind black hole in the domestic universe, associated
with womens body and labor it stands as an invisible bottomless receptacle for what we do not
want to see, that which is stained and dirty, unmemorable.
Current Work
I set out to investigate these assumptions and what do they entail. Without a premeditated result
in mind, in the studio I start by reproducing a specific basket, complete, at a much larger scale,
to then proceed to cut and fragment it in a way that will allow for new compositions. The
outcome has been a series of architectural hybrids that may suggest shelters, cages, traps and
ruins. With a sense of play and makeshift precarity, the agglomerate forms are constructed and
deconstructed, propped and braced. Planes of plywood, corrugated cardboard, papier-mâché
and plaster are perforated by exaggerated portholes, both mimicking the original motives, but
essentially emphasizing the porosity of the form, leaving an opening for the viewer to project
themselves inside.
I am aiming to make work that it is familiar and monstruous at the same time, that can function
as a welcoming shelter but may collapse and trap you, that doesn’t separate tenderness from
aggression, destruction from care, vitality and grace from impermanence.
These sculptures speak to me of ancient ruins and archaeological sites, but also and most
importantly of Rome’s organic, sensual and layered urban landscape where structures behave
like bodies: falling, leaning against, pushing, embracing, concealing; a dialectical methodology
of building that incorporates destruction, accident and repair, making the city a living changing
reality. It is with this vulnerable corporeality that I want my work to be impregnated with.

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