Gone-ness Using photography, video, installation, multi-media and drawing, Nerea Martinez de Lecea creates portraits that go far below the surface of skin and facial characteristics. Currently working on her most ambitious drawing project to date, she tells Emma Geliot about her interest in making the invisible visible. Nerea Martinez de Lecea is an artist whose work strikes a chord of familiarity, while she herself is more difficult to pin down or categorise. You can find her work on just about every online digital platform going. She has won many awards and attracted a lot of attention internationally, with exhibitions, screenings and collaborations in London, Taipei, Singapore, Copenhagen, Toronto, Paris, Monaco, Beirut and in her adopted home in Wales, to name just a few. Paradoxically, while her photographs, videos, installations and drawings are astonishingly revealing and, occasionally, shockingly explicit, the artist remains intensely private. Emma Geliot: I’ve been very interested in your work for a long time now, but had never really thought of it as portraiture until you described it in that way. Nerea Martinez de Lecea: I would say my work is portraiture in a loose sense of the word – it’s about going beyond the surface image of a person, to communicate feelings and experiences. Portraits are traditionally associated with showing who the person is, with visibility and presence. My own portraits, on the other hand, are generally about disappearing, about ‘gone-ness’. They deal with fractured identity and a dislocated sense and sensation of being in the world. EG: There is a real sense of vulnerability in much of your work and the nakedness of a lot of your figures underline this. Is that what you intend? NMdL: Yes. Where the body is depicted naked, it presents the disturbing fragility of our skin – the border that protects us, precariously, from the physical world around us. My work attempts to reveal the experience of solitude and strangeness that one’s own skin can produce. I combine gesture and expression, mark-making, movement, sound and text to convey the unsaid, make visible the unseen.
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