Mijn atelier: Melissa Cruz Garcia

“The atelier is a diagram of one’s mental history plus experience”

Moving around, carrying here and there only the indispensable; it’s being one of the most embodied circumstances of my way of creating and working.
Although, I experienced that I always had and needed an atelier.
One, in the form of a portable suitcase full of watercolours, pencils and sketchbooks or sometimes; an indigenous bag with basic knitting tools, wool and some “object trouve” which I was founding on the way, while I was walking along the Colombian geography.
The physical space of my first atelier was a room at my parent’s house in Bogota; where I will be mixing self-made pigments and inventing ways to improvise the supports where to conceive my first bi-dimensional expressions. I guess, improvisation had always being connected with my way of working. I enjoy having a set up atelier somewhere, but I have the feeling that my work get enriched by experiencing a nomad atelier; I like that.
I consider the atelier as the intrinsic space where ideas come to be born, reality get mixed with the fictional artist’s mental world. Concentration, silence or noise and the feeling of happiness get all involved. But for me; the world itself could be the atelier and I like to experience it as the way I state my artistic method: A Contextual Art.

New Landscape Art. “Travelling Object”2007. Outdoors recycling.

Because, when the creative process occurs, at the same time; there are many other things happening and fluxing in the outside world. In my particular case, the necessity to explore the boundaries of the world can and do improve the artistic outcome of my work.

“Action, Happening, Happiness” 2008. Nomad-Urban intervention.

I enjoy to produce drawings, writings or experiments “in situ”, on the context of an specific environment in contrast with its history; investigating its cultural and/or social history. In resume; getting familiar with the surroundings. But, having an established and fixed atelier helps me to prepare materials, focus more on sketches and explore in deeper the field of my artistic study, which is basically optics and light phenomena. For this field, you really need a place where everything should be very precise. Almost like a laboratory.

When an artist is fascinated by colour and painting, he/she might discover that his/her research is in effect, about light.

“Narcissus II” 2012. Collected paraffin, slow motion video in loop, cooking and heating pans. Photo by Ed Jansen.

My early paintings were integrated to walls. Along the years, I put the pigments aside and got fascinated by light. Perhaps, because we have in The Netherlands other sort of brightness.

I became a light painter, intending to integrate the history of the location where am working and using the resources which a found on spot. This method of working claims the flexibility of being able to create in every location and at the same time, to have the possibility to prepare things in a studio or in a room. The materials, objects or/and sculptures I prepare for building up my installations or light paintings are simultaneously portable: miniature drawings which can be transported on a pocket, foldable optical machines, self-made projectors mounted on wheels.. Nomad-ism is a constant in my work.

I am recently moving more and more with my artistic work. It was necessary to give up my fixed studio for a while in order to embrace the possibilities of my way of working. I will be developing my practice in Bogota until the end of the current year and at my return to Europe I had arranged a studio of a friend of mine in an old school building.
I like the idea to learn how to deal with the qualities of what is impossible space wise, in order to make things possible on spot.
Every location appeal to me a container of topics, scenes, new things to conceive, to dislike and/or like. As if doing art will be an adventure full of risks and discoveries.

I think, this makes my practice to be a routine exercise of being amazed by the world in its most simple aspects; and I like that above all.

“Out of Range” 2010-2012. Urban and Nomad intervention