The work of Susana Guerrero (Elche, 1972) is in its entirety an exploration of metamorphosis, transformation and creative alchemy, from the characters that populate her pieces to the hybridisation of the shapes or materials employed. Her worldview blends the legacy from a time long past, full of myths and magic, with an analytical approach focused on domestic life. Through this combination, the artist delves into repair processes to create works that turn vulnerability into strength, death into renewed life, pain and wounds into means of healing and empowerment.
By appropriating and reinterpreting stories about headless female creatures or women (Medusa, the Mare dels Peixos from Valencian folktales, Saint Catherine of Alexandria or Saint Quiteria), Susana Guerrero aims to heal them and transform them into inspiring heroines. In other words, her creative work is like an umbilical cord, an insightful and highly precise tool to detect and heal old scars.
Prepared for two years by the artist herself and curator Remedios Navarro, the exhibition offers a delicate tapestry based on mutual understanding. To build the creative world on display here, they have engaged in dialogue with each other, investigating the sources available and encouraging the free association of ideas. Their goal was to analyse the creative process as an essential part of life, as the reflection of experiences and thoughts that are turned by art into poetic and symbolic matter – by looking at the past, we can address the challenges of the present and the future.
Since the starting point for this project was the dialogue between Navarro and Guerrero, it was crucial to show everything that was gradually built during their meetings: the final sculptures, drawings, engravings and other pieces; the sketches, assemblages and conceptual maps; the work tables and materials gathered; the books and other sources, including photographs of Graeco-Roman, Eastern or Aztec artistic and archaeological pieces; the texts on mythology, anthropology or alchemy; the illustrations from old anatomical treatises.
The guiding thread of this exhibition is the concept of time, constantly renewing itself and intimately connected with the female principle of creation from which everything emerges, the inner journey through a mother’s body. This is represented by the ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail that symbolises the unity and continuity of all existing things.
Our body is a machine. Blood, milk and salt water, composed of the same elements, circulate through it, inside and outside, present in our bodies as well as in our myths. That’s why the works shown here focus on these three substances.
The structure of the exhibition allows dialogue between pieces from different periods, selected by the curator in order to find new connections and perspectives. The project looks at artistic creation as a whole: the sources of inspiration, the creative processes and, finally, the finished works, which blend metals, ceramics, textiles and assemblages. The resulting pieces and installations are highly metaphorical, alluding to concepts such as renewal, healing, power and resistance.
The exhibition proves that our identity has been shaped by stories inherited from a distant past. They reflect their creators’ conducts, conceptions and values, which were left behind a very long time ago and should be deconstructed and resignified to create a new mythology, consistent with who we are and what we think. And that’s what Susana Guerrero does. In her work, visible and invisible reality merge into a fabric in which atavism and modernity, intuition and reason, or science and spirituality become intertwined.