For many years I have been very curious about the content of refrigerators in houses which I visited, and their relationship with the kinds of people who lived in them. I noticed that people who lived on their own had particular kinds of refrigerators: their frequent lack of content and air of neglect seemed very expressive…they reflected a sense of abandonment and loneliness.
I couldn’t help associating the content of the refrigerator with the interior, individual world of the people themselves. The carcass of this household appliance becomes a coffer which contains the tangle of emotions, feelings and forms of behaviour which combine to shape our psyche. It creates a wall between the people and the outside world. As human beings we all have a certain reluctance to show what is happening to us internally, what we are really thinking and feeling, and there is a particular resistance to demonstrating something as common as a sense of loneliness.
My attention was also drawn to another of the many ways in which loneliness is expressed, the world of embroidery…
For me embroidery has always represented the thoughts of people who, due to their extreme solitude, cannot express themselves verbally to others. The process describes the emotions of a lonely soul and expresses them in each line of thread. It transports us directly to a territory of fabrics, knots, tangles, twists and endless flows.
Without doubt, solitude is one of the main problems of contemporary human existence. However, it is not solitude itself which is the difficulty, but fear of it, be it real or imaginary. This dread of loneliness is frequently a cause of unhealthy or toxic relationships. Social groups, couples, marriages, friendships…they are maintained, even if they are sterile or destructive, due to a simple fear of loneliness.
All of these reflections began to occur to me at a moment when I was facing a new stage in my artistic life. The fear of isolation was invading me in my studio, and it was precisely then that I began to develop the project which led to the images I am now presenting.
As the project progressed, another fundamental sensation was working its way into my mind… The concept of freedom, which is an essential part of who I am and how I live, was more and more present in my process of investigation and I wanted to reflect this in some way in my work. Freedom is also intimately related to solitude, and often, the latter is the price one has to pay for the former. That was how I came to include the butterfly in my images, as a conclusion to my reflections on the subject, symbolising freedom.
We have to learn to be alone, without fear, and to enjoy our individuality, because solitude is only a small price to pay if, in exchange, we have the sensation that we are completely free. We may feel better or worse, but freedom is always worth it.