Sarah Misselbrook 2019
‘El ganchillo de la araña hembra’
I painted this work in June of this year. During the summer I always see these spiders in my finca. Their webs are incredibly strong and their bodies are large with armour like detail.
After more research, I discovered this spider is the female tiger spider and is generally larger than the male. She spins her web between structures and creates a unique signature to stabilise and personalise her creation. Speaking with the owner of this house I discovered she loves to crochet. She is also a very strong woman. In fact, there are a lot of very strong women here in Riba-roja I have had the pleasure to get to know.
Just as Fina creates her crochet, then the spider spins her web. It is these, predominantly female, activities that protect and continue vital cultural traditions. Making connections between myself as an artist, other people and nature, that is at the heart of my work.
Misselbrook was born in the United Kingdom in 1977. The artist graduated with honours in Fine Arts in 2000, Nottingham Trent University (UK) and it is from then on, when she begins her multimedia practice. In 2007, she studied for a postgraduate degree in Fine Arts at the Cyprus College of Art, Paphos. In 2011, she studied a Master of Fine Arts at the Winchester School of Art (UK). Since 2012, Misselbrook has lived in the Riba-roja d’Ebre countryside, which serves as her connection and is her source of inspiration for her works.
Her practice includes ‘performance’, video recordings with her voice in isolation and ‘site-specific’ sculptural installations. She addresses various topics such as gender, feminism, the female body as a canvas, and consumption. In this sense, she focuses on the individual responsibility of consumption and its environmental consequences. To do this, she uses degradable or edible materials such as chocolate, soap, latex, soil or wax.
The juxtaposition of hard against soft, light against dark, and sensual against skeleton are elements of Misselbrook’s visual language. In short, an internal struggle in a body that is all-consuming. Recently, she has been invited to create an installation and a performance in the Maials forest, which was
devastated by a forest fire in June 2019. The work is part of the ‘Cendrart’ project. Her works are the result of the total immersion in the rural environment and the constant research on the balance between life and death, transience and fragility.
