"If old habit keeps you comfortably sad, try a little salt"
—Maria Duran
Maria Duran is our featured Art contributor for Issue 5: Mirage! Her seaside photographic collages strike a pensive aesthetic harmony, which you can find here. An art historian from Lisbon, Portugal, Duran elaborates on her collaging process, the cultural and familial inspirations behind these artworks, and much more in this beautifully insightful interview. "The seaside makes you tender, I think, permeable to memories and old lingering emotions," muses Duran; I hope you find tenderness, nostalgia, and empathy not only in Duran's collages, but in her thoughtful reflections on their origins. Enjoy!
How would you describe your artistic style and process? What mediums and tools do you use?
The collages I make based on my personal photographic archive are the most prolific, and the most personal, because of how they speak to my lived memories, but also for how they can become spaces for fiction, poetry, journaling and even research. The world is so full of wonderful details worth working on.
I blame and thank my mother, who, in an effort to make a very distracted child look up from the pages while out and about town, told me a good writer had to pay good attention to the world to have something to work with.
I managed not to run into too many lamp posts while walking and reading, thanks to this advice, and it is a philosophy I keep to, and has been very useful not just for writing, but for all artistic and emotional processes.
Well before I started making collages, I had a passion for different textures. I enjoy making small collections of textile patterns, barks, but also urban elements - graffiti and patterned cobblestones, elevators, flora, fauna, interesting architecture.
My mixed media work tends to be digital. The images I collect tend to be from my phone, so that is definitely the tool I owe the most too; I work text and image on Canva, Photopea, sometimes using both at once.
I keep away from AI, and build my own layouts; the goal is to make something original, and develop a singular design style. I love layering text and images, I love working with transparency, the power of repetition.
What themes do you like to emphasize in your work?
Environment, environment, environment.
Places have their own speech, their layered history. As an artist and art historian, it is the culmination of factors behind any constructed and natural environment that speaks loudest. And it is such a personal relationship, what we project into places.
What inspired you to create these two pieces, “driftwood dreams” and “if old habit keeps you comfortably sad, try a little salt”?
These two pieces were developed and completed on the same day, so they are in close dialogue with each other. The inspiration is, again, a place: Monte Gordo, a small village right where the southernmost shore of Portugal, very near the border with Spain.
My grandparents visited it when they were young, and my mother grew up going there too; it is a common place for people from the deep Portuguese South to visit.
During the New State dictatorship, people visiting Monte Gordo and the neighboring villages got to cross over to Spain, and know another world for some hours, before going back home, sometimes of course with contraband vinyls or books. It is a place with a lot of history behind the rampant gentrification and touristification. Escapism can mean a great many things, there.
There is a lot of history there for my family as well, and it has embedded itself into our migratory habits.
I have visited this place nearly every summer of my life. It’s not the first time this year I turned to it as a source of artistic energy, but I felt I had used all the words I had to speak about it, so visual elements were my recourse.
For “driftwood dreams,” how does the text running up the left side of the image contribute to the composition and meaning of your piece?
Oh, that is a good question!
After a while of working with recording the sealine, I sat down to make a collage and the vertical placement of the text was the one try I found spoke most definitely to the intent of the piece.
The shore is such an overwhelmingly horizontal place, verticality felt like the one course to develop any kind of human language that would not be swallowed, literally or metaphorically, by the presence of the sea.
I love the title of “if old habit keeps you comfortably sad, try a little salt”—how did you come up with this title, and how does it reflect the artwork?
Thank you! It was a bit of a daring title, because I wanted to let the work speak for itself, but also to have
the self-determined agency a title provides.
The intent was very much to have a visual poem, of some sort. I took out my phone to the shoreline, on my usual walks, this year with the intent to arm myself with enough decent photographic material to have a stable foundation to address the poetry that was straining at the seams.
The seaside makes you tender, I think, permeable to memories and old lingering emotions.
On the other hand, returning to the places of childhood can have a stultifying effect, make it harder to be truthful and articulate. In this way, making “driftwood dreams” and “if old habit keeps you comfortably sad, try a little salt” was a very satisfying process, and a way to address the tendency to return to old patterns in old places.
What overarching emotions and thoughts do you wish to evoke in audience's minds through your photography?
I hope being presented with new forms of occupying a moment in time will let them share a little of the poetry behind the piece.
It is all about that - the impression a moment can have, layed and demanding attention. Visual poetry, in its way, but also a testimony of something real that can be real in many ways.
More than anything, when it comes to evoking a response, I hope it inspires people to pay attention to their surroundings. Their own reactions to where they are, and when they are.
What plans do you have for the future regarding art?
I learn something new every time I do a new piece. This sounds cliché, but it’s true - especially if you have, like me, no formal learning in design and photography, only theory, it is particularly true! I’d like to develop my own fonts for different series.
I went through a phase of scanning all my old physical drawings and paintings, and using them as collage elements - I am looking forward to making more work like that, with new works and physical collages blending with digital montages. I love working with charcoal, and that is something I would like to return too, as well as try new textures.
I definitely want to print some of my photographs and collages, and have been looking into printing into cloth. There is a curious anxiety around it, the idea of putting my work into physician shape, but I think it’s worth the experiment, at least.
Theme-wise, I hope to do more organized, site-specific works, with some hard research behind them.
I have also been looking at how to develop an artist’s book or a collage zine. No promises so far, but keep an eye out!
Anything else you would like to add about your art?
Only to urge anyone interested in these works to try to meld the written word with the visual. Do it, do it, do it! You will find a way to speak with the images, and to let them say their piece too.
Anything that you are passionate about, enamored with, can be later used as a grounding element and a creative direction. I am letting my senses guide the work, and it has been very freeing to build this new process.
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