Spicule Veil

Spicule Veil resulted from a short residency at CIIMAR. The opportunity to ask the researchers about the body of sponges, their skeletons, and what do they do?, do they move?, was fundamental to develop our work with a better understanding of the complexity and wonder of these animals.

The work was mainly focused in the porous quality of the sponges, its spicules, and the way water moves through them. This resulted in drawing with translucency, making see-through images - drawings made clear as light peers through them.

When first visiting CIIMAR we had the opportunity to learn about sponges, and see a lot of different images and scientific representations of these animals: illustrations, samples of parts of their bodies, photographs, videos, schematic drawings and microscopic images of spicules.

These visual resources have very different graphic qualities, they have different scales, are drawn or rendered by different lenses, focusing on the full body of a sponge or fragments of it. Not being able to draw sponges from nature, the approximation to the subject was made by trying to puzzle all these images together.

The opportunity to ask the researchers about the body of sponges, their skeletons, and what do they do?, do they move?, was fundamental to develop our work with a better understanding of the complexity and wonder of these animals.

I started drawing on a familiar scale (between A4 and A3), and then decided to draw on a larger paper. This presented some difficulties as I am not familiar with the total volume and characteristics of the sponge body. This could maybe be surpassed in time with continuous study of the motif in collaboration with the researchers, so that I could better imagine the subject when drawing.

I ended up cutting the larger scale drawings to a more familiar size to better control the image I was trying to achieve, working with the lightboxes and making the adjustments I found more interesting.

The more subtle drawings were left as that to better relate to the thin-subtle quality of a veil. In turn, the exercise of adding more spicules, multiplying traces of light, intended to make dense images that could illuminate the drawing placed below.

The work is presented in lightboxes allowing the observer to play with the drawings as layers and see through them combining different images. The drawings were made with an oil medium on low grammage office printing paper.