Tuneladora

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.”

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Abundant Futures", C3A, Córdoba, 2022)