CLAUDIA ALVAREZ

Claudia Alvarez is an artist who values touch, gesture, and the intuitive nature of clay. For her it is a revelatory process; when she’s using her hands, she is “pushing from the outside and inside all at the same time to get that initial response.” She continues, “For me, the gesture is in relationship and in conversation with the material, with the clay. With the fingerprints…it’s more about the clay and the revealing of the building process.”

When sculpting figures, Alvarez is occupied with the vulnerability of our bodies, motion, and memory. “I understand the body because I worked in the hospital for twelve years. The body has always been an important part of the work, how I understand and remember various motions and marks, and how I understand anatomy from just a memory because I don’t look at a figure or photograph.” Her work may strike the viewer as a powerful dance between confrontation and mercy.

Alvarez has recently worked on sculptures of children in postures of repose, reclining, or lying down. She shares that childhood memories of moving from Chicago to California are part of the inspiration: “Our first summer there, we worked in the fields, and we slept in our cousin’s garage. There were nine siblings: eight of my brothers and sisters all lined up in the garage.” On the subject of children lying down, for her, there is a stark contrast between the children of the wealthy and the children of migrants at the border between the US and Mexico.

She wanted to explore the meaning of the resilience of these displaced children: “I was on Instagram and I started to look at the children of celebrities like Alec Baldwin. Those children were reclining and doing all these [leisurely] things. Then my research went to children at the border: all the kids during the Trump administration who were in a big room with the cages. You could see all these kids just living their lives on the floor with the silver blankets and the mattresses—and everybody could see them day and night. I wanted to think of them out of context, so I started to look at different types of sitting or reclining figures. My original idea was to talk about displacement and survival of displacement.”

Some of her child figures are caught in moments of violence, imitating the violence of the adults that surround them. In installations, they may be positioned so that the gallery visitor can move through them, sensing their physical presence and feeling one’s own body in space in relation to these representations of children. Their body language may be bold, or even strident, as they rehearse these adult interactions. The temporary theatre that these figures make for the viewer holds space open with the force of their determination to stand their ground.

There is a great humanity to Alvarez’s work, and all of it—from sculpture to painting to drawing—is suffused with curiosity and a profound respect for the endurance of being human. “The fine line between that tenderness [of the child] and the adult” offers each of us space to examine the nature of our conduct, our behavior, and our strengths.