LA MAR
The sea is a woman.
Her depths are made of siren songs, sea foam and tears from mythological creatures.
LA MAR
“A river without end, enormous and wide, flows through the world’s literatures. Over and over again: the women-in-the-water; woman as water, as a stormy, cavorting, cooling ocean, a raging stream, a waterfall; as a limitless body of water that ships pass through . . . woman as the enticing (or perilous) deep; as a cup of bubbling body fluids; the vagina as wave, as foam . . . love as the foam from the collision of two waves, as a sea voyage.¨ Stefan Helmreich’s “The Genders of Waves. At sea.” quoting Klaus Theweleit
“First there was the sea. All was dark. There was neither sun nor moon nor people, nor plants or animals. The sea was everywhere.” We can find this narrative in many creation myths. In Mediterranean culture and mythology there is strong underlining of the theme around the feminine nature of the water dating back to the Prehistoric Times, visible in the personifications of the primordial substance of life, aquatic features, marine disasters and natural phenomena.
The sea has been motherly amnion, seductive siren, unruly tide and the waves
– icons of rhythmic and predictable motion as well as of chaos and destruction.
The mythological stories of the Mediterranean are the basis of my project La Mar.
I am drawn to the theme of the sea and its manifestations as female personifications. As well as the reflection of this motif in the language and poetics of the Mediterranean.
The sea is symbolised as the Mother Goddess or a kingdom inhabited by nymphs, sirens and monsters, a medium between life and death, between the sacred and the profane. Language and poetry have preserved this topic while the anthropological linguistics have delved deeply into it.
La Mar continues this conversation through the creative process itself.
The shore and the rocks turn into a studio, the seawater into paint. My interaction with the canvas follows the movement and dynamics of the water. I use my body as a mediator and as a woman I become part of this marine female mythology.
The project includes a series of large-format canvases and small-format drawings on paper.
