RESIDENCY AADK 2021
For the December 2021 AADK Open Studio, Esberg presents LOOKING, WALKING, DREAMING an installation responding to a 3-month residency in Blanca, Murcia, Spain.
Esberg's practice is site responsive, autobiographical, and based on the aesthetic and poetic exploration of the connectedness of beings and things.
Esberg borrows concepts, materials, and processes from the Land Art, the Arte Povera, the Social Sculpture movements, and phenomenology. She highlights the impermanence of the human experience and anthropocentrism by removing time frames.
As with her ongoing Wytham Woods residency in Oxford, walking is key to her work. It is an opportunity to engage with space intimately.
Esberg uses lens-based media and found objects to document traces, marks, and narratives that she transforms into a series of works embodying her experience of space.
"Each walk in Blanca started with the hope of finding an elusive sea fossil amongst the hills and ravines that were once part of an ancient seabed.
I picked figs and pomegranates, crushed lemon leaves that produced the most incredible scent, and collected rubbish thrown from passing cars, unusual rocks, and discarded bits of ceramics. I was told stories by local people, investigated local myths, and photographed the human touch, sometimes light, sometimes ugly amongst the stunning and tormented landscape.
Walking allows me to pay attention to sounds and silences, colours, materials, and in turn, my physical limitations create an invisible, comfortable yet frustrating boundary. With time the landscape changes me ."
CANALES, BRAZALES Y AZARBES/ CANALS, and CAMPANAS / BELLS both use the technique of the Quipu, a pre-Columbian Andean recording device of knots and string Esberg investigated in Chile. The material used in the string sculptures is similar to Esparto, a wild natural fibre found in the hills.
CANALS materialises the Segura river's network of aqueducts and norias that plays a crucial role in the valley. The piece BELLS transforms and transposes the experience of familiar sounds into a multi-dimensional map of the area.
AZUL DE BLANCA is a growing collection of modern archaeological finds and photographs.
Esberg also presents CLOTH, a series of photographs that continues her investigation of the human touch.
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