Carmen Garcia Ramos
Projects
My visual work draws from autobiographic experiences with motherhood, parenting, care and conflict. At time introspective and at times profundly socially concerned. I use different mediums photograpy, print and paiting that depict often matter in the making, ecologies of preternatural creatures and imagined fluid hybrid worlds, where fragility and roughness talk to each other.
Cerro Azul (Blue Hill)
“Cerro Azul” is a tribute to the place and community of the same name in the Colombian Amazonia that I visited with my family in the summer 2023. The community is an example of success of how to transform the complex relation between conflict, nature, culture and humans into an ecofriendly and sustainable economy. This work is an Ode to the entire region, its vulnerability and resilience against power and violence. A place where beauty, color, the pristine nature and ancestral rock paintings make us feel a deep connection with nature and think about human kind in its passing by earth. I would like the viewer to give a though to this location, far for some in their daily reality and how connected we all are in our everyday decisions and actions.
Echoes of C0exsistance
In this work i took inspiration in my relation with my small daughter, I share her fascination with the shapes, colours, objects, and materials she gathers. I find it important to give visibility to profound or very banal situations you find yourself in while being a parent, always surprising. Vulnerability, sleeplessness, excitement is as important as mending, garden-clot clearing, or house tiding. I start from a collection, an inventory of totally random objects my daughter brings in her daily exploration of her environment. I collect them and keep them as traces of mothering and her existence in my life, almost as forensic proof.
Mother Memorabilia
A piece of play dough, a smashed shell, a broken toy...a plastic trophy....I experiment with their uniqueness, softness, fragility, fragmented or torn qualities in different mediums in an attempt to document the act of bonding between parent and child, like mother memories, mother memorabilia.
Mapping Conflict
This is your Project description. Provide a brief summary to help visitors understand the context and background of your work. Click on "Edit Text" or double click on the text box to start.Mapping conflict is a tribute to the victims and witnesses of war, conflict and impasse situations all over the world. They are confronted everyday of their lives with the reality of violence and atrocities unspeakeable to mankind. We mostly only see them as codes on a paper or as stereotypes. I wanted to expose the consequences of armed conflict and explore other ways to deal with the images the aftermath of a conflict leave us with, the violence and rage but also the fragility of the witness, the resilience of the victims, the grieve. I was seraching with this work for a new language. My prints borrowed some of the forensic aesthetics of maps, X-rays scans, and material evidence as would be stored and presented in court room. Between abstraction and reality I would like the viewer to give a thought to these locations far removed from eachother and at times from us, but very conncted to all of us in our everyday decisions and actions. The medium was carefully chosend as it has some paralles with what conflict does, a crushing mashine, the act of pressing and opressing method a conflict has on us, devastating everything in its way and giving back to us an image we can not recognise, still familiar, prehaps a shadow of what was before.
