ARTIST STATEMENT
I found my work as a sculptor, shaped by my experience as a psychoanalyst.
I was born in Argentina a few months before the end of the World War and the atrocities of this event have been a presence throughout my life.
After starting my practice as a psychoanalyst, raising a family and after many years of involvement in social and political issues during a harsh dictatorship, I emigrated to Spain in the 70’s where hopes for a new democratic regime was emerging.
For almost 20 years in Spain, I was involved with women’s issues from a psychoanalytic perspective and at the same time exploring artistic languages of expressions. Moving to the States in the middle 90’s - while keeping my practice as a psychoanalyst - was the opportunity to pursue a new passion: sculpting.
As a sculptor, developing the technics, exploring new materials, creating new ways of inhabiting a three-dimensional space, realizing the importance of light, gave me the opportunity to express what for me was impossible to express in a different language; a language with no words.
When starting a new work, even when I am sure where I want to go, I soon lose control and the work becomes independent of me, with its own power and at the same time, a mirror of something profound and unknown. The final result takes me always by surprise.
When Freud described the way psychoanalysis operates as a therapeutic method, he used a quotation from Leonardo da Vinci, summed up in the formula: per via di porre and per via di levare; Freud said that “in reality, between the different techniques of psychotherapy, there is great opposition, the same opposition that regarding the fine arts, Leonardo described in his formula. Painting said Leonardo operates per via di porre, adding color where none existed on the white canvas, while sculpture operates per via di levare, removing from the stone the mass that hides the statue contained within it.”
The teaching of psychoanalysis is also present in my work and reflects when naming each piece, a need to make a mark through a word that symbolized my curiosity and passion for theoretical knowledge. My work as a sculptor is shaped by my experience as a psychoanalyst. I travel from one place to another – from my office to my studio – taking with me ideas of a space that one occupies in the relationship with the other, and in this way, sculpting becomes a way of symbolizing and telling stories through abstract memories,