Teresa Solar
Tuneladora, 2021

Teresa Solar
Tuneladora, 2021

Refractory clay, resin, paint, varnish, metal-ceramic shaft
160 x 217 x 80 cm

Tuneladora is part of a new series of sculptural works by Teresa Solar, investigating the formal intricacies of the Tunnel Boring Machine (2021–). Modeled after an industrial and technological object used to cut through soil and rock, the works emulate and build on a vibrant biomimetic vocabulary. Giant beaks, wings, fins, and claws, made of resin and brightly colored with acrylic automotive paint, rise from their heavy ceramic bases. The crude stump of clay carries the imprint of the hands and fingers that shaped it and starkly contrasts with the slick, colorful, and elegantly designed protuberances that emerge from it. The zoomorphic extensions are like the “fingery eyes” of a barnacle or the oversized claws of a prehistoric animal that has ascended from the earth’s crust. They could have pierced through the mineral ground to relate telluric scenes of imagining and interacting with the deep strata of residues piled up in layers of sediment, each covering over its submerged predecessors. Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga compares Solar’s earth-boring scenarios to the divination practice of dousing, employed to sense and locate groundwater, buried metals, gemstones, oil, radiations and earth vibrations. To her, the artist channels “an imagination that runs through tunnels, passageways, galleries and cavernous systems buried in the bowels of both the earth and the body.”
 
The sculpture emerged from a set of drawings Solar created during the expedition Spheric Ocean: To Find the Vegan Lion organized by TBA21–Academy to New Zealand in 2018. The artist uses drawing and watercolors to capture fleeting reflections and experiences and distill formal experiments prior to and in response to her ceramics and sculptural work. Forma de fuga: Nacimiento de las islas evokes pneumatic configurations that may also be interpreted as elongated legs or claws. Rendered in bright orange, the shapes of what seems to be the two limbs of a biped, bent at their knee joints, are held in suspension by a metal contraption or orthopedic instrument. These extremities play with the ability of a material to have its shape changed, rendered ductile, lithe, and elastic. With a subtle medical-anatomical flair, the organic plasticity of Solar’s formal experiments also evokes the long muscular tubes of intestines, the cartilaginous passageway of the trachea, and the excavated tunnels carved by boring machines and moles.
 
Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1985. Lives in Madrid.