Fracta
One day I started to break down. First, inside, not in the guts, but in the soul. Then on the outside. I don’t really remember the order of the factors, but I did become more aware that this breakdown would mark who I am and where I was headed.
My work Fracta is a triptych of pain, of rupture, of emotion. When pain becomes a constant, such as hand-washing, combing or showering; it becomes a fixed, permanent, distressing image; it becomes an obsession. My obsession. Never before in my creations have I expressed this experience so explicitly. They were more like pieces, sketches, memories of it. In Fracta naked something very intimate. It is the story of a process of personal acceptance, when my world was besieged by continuous physical pain, which took over my identity.
Through these severed limbs, starting from a knee that gradually destabilizes the entire bone structure until it damages the ligaments, I want to express the pain, my pain, that oppressed me and locked all my dreams in a cage. I felt like a little doll, one of those dolls that can be easily disassembled, with removable limbs. Like mathematical fractals, everything becomes entangled in sharp lines, which run through bare bodies. All of them, mine. Destined, like the martyrs of the seventeenth century with their Byzantine gilt, to a kind of incomprehensible torture. The heeled shoe, an object so attractive to me, became a forbidden thing, and therefore a desired symbol of femininity. A dance, so often a relief in my moments of anger, accompanies the triptych, as an ephemeral memory of my free and then awkward movements. Of my struggle to follow the natural line of my hips.
Once again, I use a language full of symbols, metaphors and fetishes to express such a personal universe. Ripped stockings, collages of nude clippings from the 1920s; toys from the last century, belonging to my paternal grandmother, representing the pillar of life that was for me; the nervously improvised acrylic splashed in a nervous and improvised way, a reflection of despair and various anxieties; fragments of vintage magazines in French, a language I do not understand, far from my reality and which represents what it meant to psychoanalyse my recovery; the opaque coloured powder of «pastel» and recycling are some of the elements I have used to convey the emotions I felt during this process.
Today Fracta lives with me, elevates me in an eternal échapé. I can express it because it has mutated like me. After many phases, she’s me too, and being me, it hurts less. What used to be waste is now overcoming and sheltering.
Miriam Martínez Abellán
Fracta del latin, <<Quebrada>>, is the title of a personal work I did for a major project entitled Obsesio, along with other international artist; Polonia, Francia, Australia, y EE.UU. Coordinated by Belén Conesa from the residence of Contemporary Art ‘La Postiza’ of Murcia, it could materialize in the Centro Párraga of Murcia.
Analogical collage, acrylic, ink on paper
23 x 14 cm