My work examines the relationship between humans and nature by juxtaposing landscape elements and human biology. By acknowledging our embodiment of nature, perhaps we can care for the ecosystems that sustain us as much as we care for our own bodies. My series, "Origins"are imaginary landscapes with placenta imagery, lichen, and mushrooms. The backgrounds contain silkscreened or painted abstracted placentas inspired by my own placenta print that I made after my son’s birth. The placenta symbolizes new life and connection because it is how the mother nourishes her child while in the womb. "Upon the Earth" combines a rocky landscape with moss between the cracks, various types of lichen, and silkscreened placenta prints. The title upon the earth speaks to the first steps of a baby; there are footprints from my child hidden in the background. It also refers to the saying "earthside" which refers to a baby being born.
I grew up in a house where asado was eaten with kimchi and where dinner conversations seamlessly shifted from English to Spanish to Korean and sometimes even Galego. My Korean, Uruguayan, Spanish, and Portuguese backgrounds lead to multi-cultural, idiosyncratic, ill-fitting puzzle pieces that make up who I am. Likewise, my multi-panel paintings are intensely fractured, creating conflict upon close inspection of the juxtaposed illusionistic and abstracted, flattened and textured forms. I disrupt the continuity from one piece to the next, as well as, push and pull on figure and ground to play with how front-to-back are perceived. Growing up, I received many quizzical looks as individuals attempted to understand and piece together my varied, ethnic background. I wish to recreate that same experience in my paintings by provoking the audience to question and work to find connections that pull the piece together. Comparable to the oddly placed blocks in the paintings, which are linked through composition and color palette, I too, am linked by a unified body made up of mixed traditions and ancestries.
Bara would like other parents to identify with the impact that children can have on their lives or offer would-be parents a unique insight into an experience of first-time parenting. Her work is also a love letter of sorts to her main inspiration, her son, as the work she creates is not only about him but for him.
The short film “Matyas” is inspired by a Czech fairy tale “Otesanek” written by Karel Jaromir Erben. The Czech folk tale from the nineteenth century talks about a living, constantly hungry, wooden log which eats its mother and its father and then continues eating other people. The end of this enormous eating is brought about by an old lady working in the fields who cuts through its wooden stomach and all the people jump out alive.
“Matyas”, the story of the all-consuming nature of maternal love, talks about a single mother who is not unhappy but very tired. The mother struggles with her constantly hungry baby who, in an addition to the original folk tale, never sleeps.
The mother grows desperate as she tries to feed the baby with everything she can find in their home. Her milk is not enough, nor is porridge, fruit or vegetables. She gives him pork and chicken meat but nothing helps. Nothing she can find fills the baby, and he constantly cries and doesn’t sleep. Finally, after over 300 sleepless nights, the mother finds a solution to this constantly growing hunger. She takes a long shower and prepares herself: she shaves her legs and armpits, she washes her hair, she brushes her teeth, all so she can be clean and ready for her baby. She has, once and for all, realised how to fulfil her baby’s insatiable hunger.