Origins: Pulling on the Golden Thread of Clothing
Susana Zabala is a contemporary eclectic textile artist.
Born in Spain, to a brotherhood of nine children, she vividly recalls her mother’s emotion when – in addition to tending to her household – she graduated as a seamstress. One may unthread Susana Zabala’s love and use of clothing to express emotions and the sensitive from there.
Textile work: this poor art or craftmanship where, under an apparent utilitarism, women have expressed their creativity for centuries.
At a very young age, Susana Zabala’s talent for drawing is noticed by her professors, but it isn’t until much later on, in Paris, that she perfects her appreciation and knowledge of plastic and visual arts. An expatriate in France, she will later come to develop her personal artistic practice.
She draws her inspiration from her particular life experience as well as from social subjects that she is moved by, always with an individual and sensitive approach.
The Crossing, for instance, evokes the fate of migrants who cross seas as well as the mythical waters of the Styx, the passage between life and death.
The tryptic composed by Fenan, Why and Stairways to Heaven is reminiscent of her beloved brother’s death but also conveys a bigger question about where our loved ones go after they pass away.
An ardent aficionada of flamenco and Andalusian culture, motifs and personal takes on topics of a mythical Spain – one recalls them in Pablo Picasso or Francis Bacon’s works – can be found in her artworks, such as I Am the Bull where she states to be the bull at the center of the plaza. The risk is accepted. Her life is at stake in her work.
The Artist’s Epiphany
Her first work is titled Partirse la camisa in reference to a flamenco expression synonymous to inspiration. An instant of duende in a night of fiesta. This moment of revelation where the individual is transcended is precisely what happened at that point, with no possible return. From then onwards, she created many more works. An artist was born. She gave birth to herself.
An Original and Heuristic Practice
And she always proceeds alike. Susana Zabala lets her mind wander while her hands are at work until the fulgurant outbreak of a form or character occurs on the canvas.
Somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious, hours of work for a unique and surprising result each time.
A Dreamlike World
Susana Zabala’s artworks sit at the intersection of abstraction, oneirism, and expressionism, always with a tint of magical realism.
With their bright colors and baroque forms, they invite the viewer to daydream in a unique, singular space suffused with spirituality and mystery.
They testify to her growing mastery of color, design, form and composition, as well as her thriving command of textures, materials, and transparency. They also bear witness to her talent and trained eye to the great pictural traditions of Western art history.
Susana Zabala’s artworks are also haptic, as much because of the artist’s use of touch as a work tool as in reference to the viewer’s experience of the supreme taboo of visual arts.
However, her work doesn’t only reference itself and visual arts. It is an invitation to synesthesia – the dialogue and correspondence of the senses – as some pieces signal other art practices that inspire her: reading and writing (The Human Comedy) as well as jazz music (A Love Supreme) of which the conscious improvisation recalls her own practice.
A Conscious Gesture Against Overconsumption
- The world production of clothing has doubled between 2000 and 2014.
- According to ADEME (the French Agency for the Environment and Energy, 2019), the French purchase 60% more clothing than 15 years ago to keep them twice less long.
- 7000 liters of water are required to produce a pair of jeans.
- Today, the textile industry is one of the most polluting ones and is responsible for 17% to 20% of water pollution, rejecting over 1 billion tons of greenhouse gaz.
Committed to a more sustainable and responsible consumption and aware of the environmental and social stakes of the fashion industry (air, water and land pollution, women exploitation, blatant inequalities in production chains, child labor and modern slavery, textile waste etc.), Susana Zabala uses recycled clothing as the prime material for her creation.
As in Arte Povera, this poor material that was discarded is sublimated and granted a new value by the artistic act.
In some instances, a loved one’s clothing piece – Montse’s, Sylvie’s, Gema’s, Geneviève’s or Fernando’s – is the artwork’s golden thread, granting it the value of a Mulé object embodying the deceased (The Strange and Witty Journey) or that of continuing the body that wore it in the manner of an abstract and intimate portrait (The Thread of my Secret).
A Co-Construction with the Viewer
Susana Zabala’s art pieces don’t reveal themselves in a glimpse.
Ambivalent and willfully ambiguous, her art is polysemic.
Eva's Choice is both an abstract landscape and a representation of Eve tempted by the biblical snake. Maybe you can also see something else?
The viewer is free to imagine and shape the work with the artist. She wishes to invite him to a playful co-creation, instead of closing one fixed interpretation of or meaning for the pieces.
Susana Zabala’s artworks remain mysterious and possess untold secrets accessible only to the viewer that will give them time to burst.
They evoke numerous forms and shapes to the one who will play the artist’s game.