Aurora Molina: Stitched Texts and Bodies
Aurora Molina’s A Word is an Open Ended Conversation exhibition, which is one of the personal showings organized by Edge Zones for aspiring artists, reveals the astounding talent of this young Cuban whom not only the gallery director, Charo Oquet, but also many other experts called “a revelation.”
Recently, Molina, an FIU graduate, was part of the W-10 exhibit presented by a group of women under the auspices of their former professor Yovani Bauta. The exhibition opened at the mentor’s studio, where Molina made such an impression that Orquet did not hesitate to offer her a personal showing. Although the idea of creating pieces based on images of wedding dresses was professor Bauta’s, Molina’s exceptional response combined various influences and elements that have given her work a very personal imprint.
First is her connection to the material she uses in place of oil paints and brushes: thread. At the age of nine, with her first encounters with needlework, Molina experienced the physical, manual joy of putting a limit to forms and creating objects by manipulating thread. The versatility she achieves with the machine sewn thread merges with the sound of the machine and the nimbleness of her fingertips to steer the cloth with such precision so as not to get pierced. Sound and movement launch her into a trance, bringing forth forms born from a deep and intimate place. This attachment to the art of sewing took on a new dimension when Molina discovered Faith Ringgold’s works on fabric during a class with artist Pip Brandt. Molina began to combine this technique with George Segal’s treatment of the human figure and discovered the very personal worldview revealed in her portraits drawn with thread on quilts.
“I wanted to draw the people around me as a counterpoint to the celebrity cult I saw in youngsters, and I wanted to do it in such a way that the images appeared almost invisible at first --that’s why I stitched them onto the back of the fabric with white thread--, but at the same time this technique gave the forms depth, a 3-D quality where the lining became thicker and allowed me to give some parts of the body more volume,” Molina explains. The technique Molina used to capture the image of friends and teachers that have impacted her life --such as Bauta himself, or Baruj Salinas who was a crucial influence on Molina’s personal process of mastering the use of color-- consists of taking a photograph, scanning it, digitally drawing the most outstanding features, and then projecting the life-sized portrait onto paper. She then sews the drawing onto the cloth with thread. At first, most of her work was monochromatic, but she later felt the need to add stains. She chose brown, not only because it is the skin tone of Hispanics, but because it seemed to breathe life into the images. “People drink coffee to pick themselves up,” she explains. Wax allowed her to block out certain areas of the fabric to keep them from staining, as if those variations in color were a metaphor for the varied vital currents that move each individual. According to Brandt, Molina’s connection to the materials is amazing. “Each day she finds new solutions, making her work open and sensitive. Unlike most artists who resort to crafts and pursue perfection, Molina’s work preserves a certain crude, soiled quality, which is precisely what instills it with a sense of urgency, of more immediate earthliness, of strong humaneness.” Molina’s portrait themes remind us of May Stevens’s Soho Women Artists, where Stevens memorialized the friends, loved-ones and artists who had an impact on her life by freezing their every-day images. Her latest subjects do not pose before the viewer; they take on postures reminiscent of the history of art.
The fact that Molina stitches these life-sized portraits highlights a connection between the sewn pieces and the human body, between the spectator and the image of these very human men and women made of fabric. Other essential elements are the presence of sewn-in words and the use of pieces of fabric taken from the subjects’ actual wardrobes. In reference to the words, Molina explains how deeply she was moved by conversations with the women from the W-10 group. “At my age, it was important to hear their stories and discuss their work. I wanted to sew the words. I was also heavily marked by the work of my father, whose formless dolls always seemed to be talking to one another. I started drifting away from realism in search of a way of depicting people through their words.”
In fact, there is an etymological connection between text and texture—both derived from texere—both of which can combine to create a body of forms or words. Sewing –consuere, to bind—her portraits in life-sized dimensions and adding words from stories is a way of giving renewed life to human connections. By sewing bodies inside bodies and words in between them, Aurora Molina also reminds us of how each of us incorporates pieces contributed by others, inhabited by their stories. Likewise, she uses pieces of fabric from the subjects’ wardrobes as a way of composing a collage of their existence. Molina’s hands stitch portraits, fabrics and words in an attempt to conjure the humaneness that today’s world has misplaced.
