Two women take us towards the culture of the earth, to archaic times. We could say they are two “powerful women” of art, exuding telluric feelings tied to a tangible reality that relies on hand labor, like two volcanoes expelling—one, earth, and the other, vegetal fiber. The mineral world and the vegetal world join hands to recall a millenary tradition, whether from baked clay or weaving, present in the literature of all times. Both have crossed the threshold of tradition to engage with contemporaneity and the unique language of materials, reaching abstraction.
Madola‘s fingers act in service of an idea or emotional state and preserve the memory of what Keramos has been in all civilizations, from utilitarian vessels to symbolic constructions of life and death. Madola approaches ceramics with an open, infinite horizon, her only limit being her hands, which press, stack, shape, and transform matter into volumetric bodies with symbolic meaning. Her ceramics embody all the characteristics of the medium, from utilitarian vessels to the spiritual values that mankind has assigned them throughout history. They remind us of the utilitarian values ceramics have carried forward to today: the jug, the vat, the vase, the vessel that stores food to give life, and simultaneously the vessel that houses death, the stele that honors it.
Dolors Oromí has braided the fruits of the earth in their natural state to embrace the wild beauty of the forest and the knots of ancestral knowledge that have helped farmers, shepherds, and fishermen in their work. She draws energy from the forest, from plowed fields, viewing rope as a tool whose disuse offers new meaning. Her hands become the shuttle, knotting basic geometries in a dance-like rhythm that exhibits their raw materiality. Their rusticity recalls how shepherds made ropes to tie beds, tents, and huts, how farmers covered donkeys with matting, how fishermen knotted fishing nets, and how wire mesh can also join this labor.
