| If you have ever looked out of an aeroplane window, you will have noticed that even from the air, we can distinguish one place from another. From such a height, shapes lose their meaning. When everything appears flat and only the tallest mountains stand out, we can appreciate something we may not perceive as clearly from the ground: the striking interplay of colours. We live in a world where every place has its own hue.
Jackie Brookner does not need to board a plane to see this. She is used to observing landscapes with a different gaze. The primary substance of her work is material: the earth that has seen her figures emerge and grow. It is an organic, tangible element. For her, the earth is much more than the surface we live on. It is the raw material of her creation, the formless substance of her works. She has travelled extensively across Spain, exploring its terrain with the eyes of a sculptor rather than those of a traveller. The lands she has selected are strikingly diverse – varying in colour, texture and appearance. Perhaps we had never considered such variety before. Yet her work contains another substance – an intangible one: the sound of the languages in which her figures speak. This abstract element exists within the installation at Espai 13 only in the form of a recording. While the clay forms appear timeless, these fleeting voices bear witness to elusive yet evocative ideas.
The everyday nature of these two elements often leads us to overlook their significance. Brookner seeks to bind them together, to find the point at which they converge. For the sculptor, that point is the anatomical form of the tongue, a moist, hidden muscle without which we could not distinguish ourselves from other animals. The tongue is a unique organ, allowing us to do both the most basic things, tasting and eating, and the most sublime, speaking and thus reasoning.
When Brookner set out to create an installation for the Fundació Joan Miró, in a city where two languages are spoken daily, she anticipated the challenge ahead. Aware of the complex history of Catalan and Spanish, she sought to highlight their relationship and their common origins in something fundamental: the primal tongue, the language that enables us to describe and engage with the world.
Ferran Barenblit |
