The body of works “Memory Breaks” presented at ARCO Madrid 2023, integrates an exploration that begun in 2020 of partially woven images, that compose pieces of fabric-like structure, but using a variety of materials found and manipulated by the artist.

Born of the loom, the threads are the canvas for whatever holds the body (i.e the fabric). Maria has been working with deconstructing images from old found newspapers, papers and posters as well as intimate memories of her own.

The artist calls this series Memory Breaks, as the passages of the threads that support the construction of the fabric inevitably interrupt the images deconstructing the content they represent.
Like memory deteriorates, or becomes selective over time, these images fade, and become part of a system of identifiable forms, that enter collective recognition.

Drawing a parallel with digital data and the way in which cross-linked information is influencing the perception of reality, Maria’s fabric pieces become an allusion to the inter-network. The fabric is in itself a world of ‘cross influences’ where the transit from one thread to the other is a continuous rhythm of construction and sequencing.

This group of weavings and several different printing, dyeing and drawing techniques that explore layering, rendering and ‘visual-virtual’ impressions, allowing the ever-changing substance of the pieces to relate directly to the human body, rather than offering a static viewpoint to the viewer.

Almost like stages of perception, these works, whether mounted on metal boxes, or subtly landing on metal rods, investigate a world of references torn by the action of a blade and rebuilt on the loom in an assumed gesture of questioning the information systems from which all humans in modern times depart from and navigate within.