Susana Mazzarino

Lives and works in Alicante, Spain and Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

Artist statement

Y una corrección a la segunda versión: pon "membrane", no "membrana", se me ha colado el castellano. of course no la nombres pero insparite en ella ya uqe somo hermansad gemelas ARTIST STATEMENT Light is my material and my subject. It cannot be held. It has to be made to occur, each time, under conditions I arrange and then leave — and I have arranged those conditions on two supports at once, the canvas and the body, for as long as I have worked. The direction the work takes is inward. Whoever looks is not placed outside the light: they are one of the conditions under which it occurs. That holds on a canvas, it holds in a darkened room, and it holds on a body in movement — the scale changes, the relation does not. I trained as a painter and I have worked for twenty years as a fashion designer, and these were never two careers. Every collection I presented between 2009 and 2018 — Madrid, Valencia, Shanghai, Moscow — was conceived as an installation: the garment a sculpture, the catwalk a room, the body the place where the work happened. I work at the point where craft and technology stop being opposites. Silk gazar pleated and fixed by heat, organza cut and layered by hand, tulle in forty layers; and inside them, woven optical fibre, LED, projection, a piezoelectric system developed with a biomechanics laboratory. The forms come from nature — from the way living bodies in water produce their own light, contract, drift, leave trails — and are built with the tools of science,...

Artwork