Discover the contemporary work of Natalia AUFFRAY
Franco-Spanish multidisciplinary artist currently residing and studying in Madrid. She has lived more than 15 years in the countryside, developing permaculture projects and responsible use of the land, attending to the uses and disuses of the countryside, looking at its impact on the group of rural women, giving rise to informal sewing meetings. , drawing, ceramics,... in a vital project that revolves around the reappropriation of space-time and bodies in space (Andalusia and Extremadura). She has a degree in Fine Arts and combines creative work with teaching practice in the formal and informal spheres, carrying out, among other activities, textile experimentation laboratories, art and nature workshops, accompaniment in creative processes. He has collaborated, with his painting, with architects and decorators in final projects, having developed projects of art direction and props for film and TV. His interests lie around creative processes, recovered materials, found objects, memory and time, nature and preservation care through observation and the experience of the body in action. He makes ephemeral interventions in public and/or natural spaces, making his feelings and thoughts visible. He builds soft forms and textile pieces with fabrics with memory and develops a painting project in which the figuration of domestic spaces and abstract expressionism complement each other. His work revolves around the relationships and links established between people, objects and occupied spaces.
STATEMENT CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY THROUGH OTHERS I work with objects: I reuse and incorporate memories stored in bodies: bending down, picking up, gleaning gifts from the environment is, for me, subtracting stimuli from the landscape. Findings (trouvailles) are encounters along the way and allow one to compose oneself with chance: gleaning is inventorying to reorder, a process of object construction to transcend, transform, perform, ritualize,... Working with materials discarded by others is alluding to rejection: there is a metamorphosis between the person and the objects, turning them back into desirable and necessary. I build artifacts from the link generated with the occupied territory. Sewing is repairing, putting pieces together, making memory of cloth with history; textiles understood as membranes or sensitive borders between inside and outside. Textile narratives are a way of reappropriating space-time, a way of telling stories in order to tell oneself. The needle is wounding and healing at the same time. The thread appears as an umbilical cord, a temporary guide: passing over and over again, drilling, creating networks implies assimilating, pacing breathing and involving the whole body: for me, sewing is like walking without moving. The thread connects the internal with the external, alludes to reality and dreams, to the individual and the collective. My creative work brings together strategies of belonging, narratives of rootedness.
