Manuel Velázquez

An emblematic case related to the use of a traditional sculptural material, as is clay, is presented by Gloria Carrasco, who weaves with her prolific poetic production one of the most committed poetics of ceramic sculpture. Carrasco re-edited in her installations and objects, the process of manipulating clay as a signifier material.

This artist implements in her work, the figure of the metlapil as "an object ingrained in our cultural identity, with deep symbolic and testimonial meaning; icon of gender, geographic, economic, labor and social conditions". In this way, she allows for the metlapil to be shown in its elemental form, "its plastic qualities of great expressive potential as support to develop a creative process through which we can interpret, intervene, redress, alter, disrupt, incorporate various elements to decontextualize it as an objective and thus re-signify it as a generator of ideas”. In preparing this series entitled Fugitives of the metate, Carrasco assumes an act of resistance in favor of the defense of identity.

Fugitives of the metate is a sculptural installation, a kind of sculpture-object modeled in clay that provides an intimate look, often tinged with the critical commentary of its social environment.

Carrasco uses the "objectual" through the material and ceramic technique; she presents the unlimited semantic and morphological ambivalences of the sculpture-objects made of clay: while connecting to the tradition of pottery in Mexico; in this way, she enhances the communication springs between the traditional and contemporary. This peculiar "use" of metlapil associates her with the strategies of use of pre-Hispanic heritage claimed as an aesthetic expression of great representativeness in our environment.

The plastic resources and installation criteria are set looking to highlight this mixture between old forms and current contents. Her works are images taken over by a set of connotations in open confrontation with the way you play. In the hybrid frameworks of the installation, her sculpture favors the shift to installative practices, the sculptural task and multiplies its expressive potential with the recovery of artisanal practices and the assimilation of contemporary practices, based on a proposal signed by the identifying vocation. Here, identity is a notion that takes on a symbolic connotation of polysemic range.

In her work, the employment of the “object” form of the metlapil is distanced from Duchamp´s “ready-made”. it is not essentially, about appropriating and repositioning the object in an environment that subverts its "common" fate, injecting new semantic potential; it is about using the object in its condition as a referent and, above all, in its condition as a cultural signifier, whose blood connection to the identity does not support distances from a purely cultural and aesthetic interpretation. This exercise starts from a recognizable object and uses its associative and narrative features to provoke thought and foster dialogue through references which suggest, invite and provoke the possibility of multiple readings. It is an invitation to look beyond; a pretext to show through evidence other faces of an object through ceramics and the change of meaning; it is an object that represents the past in search of a place in the present.