Sharing a contemplative approach to the process of making, Isabella Russo Siqueira and Karen Rodríguez’s IN THE INTERSTICES OF SOUND AND FORM delves deeply into materiality, translation, transmutation, and liminality. With abstract form at the forefront of their aesthetic explorations, both Siqueira and Rodríguez approach the world and its constituent parts as malleable material. Alive with movement and fluidity, their works rely on observation, repetition, and representation to transform what we may deem mundane into open-ended reflections about nature and perception, or language and communication.

Consciously and unconsciously celebrating an innate connection with nature, Russo’s inherently psychological abstract paintings evolve spontaneously and respond to both, her inner world and surroundings. Embracing a multidisciplinary practice, her paintings explore the materiality of surface and object. Utilising objets trouvés or unusual materials as a starting point, Russo begins each piece by dyeing her substrates with natural pigments. Later, these unstretched and dyed canvases are laid on the ground and painted, accruing organic traces and relating to the body through scale and the unfolding painterly gestures within them. Complimentarily, Rodríguez’s ceramic sculptures reflect their maker’s body both figuratively and tactilely.

Born to a family that employed and at times modified sign language to communicate with one another, Rodríguez is intimately and personally interested in exploring notions of language, silence, and communication. Representing the facial gestures required for speech and sourced from the studied observation of her family, her sculptures give form to the commotion of communication and stillness of silence.
Exploring both the visual and textual elements of language —particularly the negative spaces or silences inherent in its use— she bestows materiality to that which goes unnoticed or unremarked and succeeds in transmuting it into other materialities. Mining the plastic possibilities of enunciation as well as silence, Rodríguez works from the nooks and crannies that are essential to the act of communication; thus leaving room to find hidden messages among the lines, contours and volumes of her pieces.
Dialoguing with abstraction and concerned with representing particular aspects of life —be it the connection between human form and nature or the relationship between sound and communication— both of their practices give shape to existence through material exploration. The four immersive paintings by Russo converse with Rodríguez’s ceramic sahumerios (incense vessels), evoking the concept of pareidolia and stimulating the senses and imagination amongst and beyond what is depicted. Reminiscent of an ecosystem on a micro or macro scale, Russo’s paintings connect the present to the notion of the universal, while Rodríguez’s abstracted sculptural heads balance the familiar and unfamiliar gestural aspects of language. Exploring the spaces between the familiar and the unrecognisable they both immortalize the patterns that emerge from the liminal spaces between one thing and another —discovering in this way, that which comes to the surface upon delving into the interstices of sound and form.

ARTWORKS

Lenguaje de señas 01P, 2024
Ceramic and raku
24.5 x 20.2 x 20.2 cm
Translucent Thresholds, 2024
Mixed media on raw canvas
160 x 70 x 4 cm
Resonance of Growth, 2024
Mixed media on raw canvas
176 x 137 x 4 cm
Emergent Horizon, 2024
Mixed media on raw canvas
176 x 137 x 4 cm
Eye of a Storm, 2024
Mixed media on raw canvas
160 x 130 x 4.2 cm
Lenguaje de señas 02M, 2024
Ceramic and raku
27 x 17 x 17 cm
Lenguaje de señas 02M, 2024
Ceramic and raku
27 x 17 x 17 cm
Lenguaje de señas 03E, 2024
Ceramic and raku
36.6 x 21.3 x 21.3 cm
Silencio - lenguaje de señas 06, 2024
Ceramic
27.7 x 22 x 22.2 cm

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