Mariana Castillo Deball’s Waterfronts commission is, she explains, “a work that can be experienced as an image, a walking path, or a narrative.”
‘Walking through the town I followed a pattern on the pavement that became the magnified silhouette of a woman’s profile’ takes as its inspiration a nearby archaeological find: the body of a young ‘Frankish woman’ excavated at St Anne’s, Eastbourne, in the late ’90s along with a number of funerary objects dating back to the Iron and Bronze ages.
Castillo Deball’s Waterfronts commission mixes archaeological fact with fiction to create a layered mythology around this young woman. Along the streets of Eastbourne pedestrians can discover a chalk stencilled rope demarcating a route that when viewed from above or via a map delineates a woman’s profile. Along the way followers of the trail encounter several sculptural objects embedded in the fabric of the street each relating to the objects she...was buried with.
A third element to the work takes place out of the town: the shape of a giant hairpin, the most magnificent of the found funerary objects, inscribed 160m long in chalk onto the Beachy Head Down. In contrast to the nearby Celtic hill figure, ‘The Long Man of Wilmington’, Castillo Deball’s geoglyph will disappear over time. “It’s an opportunity to do something that appears monumental but at the same time is very simple,” the artist states. “It’s a drawing on a scale that I never imagined I’d be able to do, but which at the same time is not invasive and is made out of materials that will fade back into the environment.”
Castillo Deball has curated a concurrent exhibition for Towner Eastbourne: ‘A drawing, a story, and a poem go for a walk: Mariana Castillo Deball curates the Towner Collection’ runs until 7 November 2021.
Mariana Castillo Deball was born in 1975, Mexico City, and lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include: MGKSiegen, Germany (2021), Modern Art Oxford, UK (2020), the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, USA (2018); and major group shows include the 8th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2014); Documenta 13, Germany (2013); and 54th Venice Biennale, Venice (2011).
Entrada actualizada el el 28 may de 2021
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