Flawed Beauty by Paloma Tandero

Paloma Tendero (b.1988) is a visual artist that works across photography and sculpture exploring ideas around genetic inheritance and identity. She was born in Spain, where she graduated from BA (Hons) Fine Arts at Complutense University in Madrid. Following that, she graduated from MA Photography at London College of Communication, where she won a mentorship award with her project Inside Out. Since then, she has been participating in artists in residence programs such as Sarabande, The Alexander McQueen Foundation in London 2020, KulturKontak in Vienna 2018. Her works has been exhibited in A Picture of Health at the Arnolfini.

Flawed Beauty, Series 2016 Digital C-Type Photograph ©palomatendero

We relate to the outside world through our bodies. The body enjoys, suffers and is the container of our emotions, organs and thoughts.

Most human activities are experienced corporeally. We don’t always need words to explain what we feel or define what we are suffering for because our bodies communicate these messages to us so immediately intimately. Some theories explore the idea that our motions and expressions are not purely biological attributes, and they can be changed by our culture. The faces we learn and how to move our bodies are part of our personalities. If the body sends us messages, the message sent by the body will depend on the individual experience we have each lived.

An important part of life is that we are made from others: in me, I can see my parents, and at the same time, my grandparents. We take and receive qualities from each other. In the same way we inherit the colour of the eyes, we take genetic disorders and habits that influence us throughout our lives.

As a visual artist, I use photography and sculpture to explore themes around genetic inheritance, heredity, identity and cycles of life. My artwork comes from my personal experience with illness: a form of chronic kidney disease I inherited at birth.

I could say that my body has been compromised by its own genetic history, by all its familial features and traits — characteristics that remain outside of my control. It is the union of these opposing forces—thestrugglebetweenmybiological designation and my self-will — that has led me to explore the subject of the body and inherited DNA.

Inside Out, Series 2014 Digital C-Type Photograph ©palomatendero

My first projects started with the exploration of somatising, the subconscious transformation of psychological conflicts into organic symptoms. And, likewise, how a physical problem becomes an emotional issue. Inside Out was the first multidisciplinary project where I incorporated photography, and other mixed media practices, examining the body as a container, with the ability to communicate more intimately than words can. I performed this piece by contorting my body into a position resembling a “beautiful” classical sculpture and wrapping an imagined depiction of my “flawed” internal body around myself. I looked at the influence of genetic disease, passed along family lines, which renders the body vulnerable to an involuntary destiny.

Some of my artistic influences come from women artists, such as Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo and Hanna Wilke. I admire the way they deal with their struggles and traumas, by returning dignity to a sick body, or documenting the reality of their physical and mental health. I understood that their physical and psychological struggles were rendered visible through distortions of their bodies, which fragmented, doubled, turned inside-out.

We could say that the body has a natural life of its own, and we suffer periods of change, pain, and metamorphosis outside our control. It seems the body is a friend when it is healthy, and an adversary when it is sick. We refuse to coexist with illness.

Susan Sontag calls disease the night side of life, as an uncomfortable citizenship, adding:

“Every person at birth has dual citizenship in the realm of health and the kingdom of the sick. Although all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later everyone is forced, at least for a time, to identify themselves as citizens of that other place” (Illness as Metaphors, 1988* , p. 2)

It is that duality — the union between two divided worlds — where my art practices fall. Looking for an interpretation of this co-existence of the healthy and the sick. Where illness and pain don't require an obvious outward manifestation to be acknowledged as real, and to illustrate the invisibility of some illnesses, to make them seen, layering these ideas visually around my body, to highlight the politics of body representation.

By using both sculpture and photography, I play around with temporality — with the fragile existence of our bodies. I reflect on the vulnerability of the physical shell and its genetics by drawing parallels with our inherited cultural ideas of beauty, and the “perfect” body.

Some of the greatest classical sculptures in the world are broken and missing limbs, however they are precious and appreciated by society without anyone questioning their flaws. By portraying myself as a sculpture on a plinth, enveloped by imaginary cysts, I bring to life the beauty in the flaws and errors that can occur in the body, as I strive to remember that organic processes are linked to us, and it is by denying the basic realities of our bodies that we become strangers to ourselves.

Humans aspire to have the same attributes of the gods: ageless, deathless. But for a woman to be a “Venus” , she must be a goddess of love, beauty, sex and desire, prosperity and fertility. The unrealistic ideals become a burden and take us further from ourselves, instead of inspiring us to be grateful to live with our imperfections, to create freedom out of our flaws. This is the subject I had in mind when I made On Mutability, exploring these ideas around bringing life to the world, balancing the internal and external through papier-mâché eggs, made of empty egg cartons.

Photography has the power to extend our bodies’ capabilities. With a camera you can be the photographer, the viewer and the model at the same time. Acting as our eyes, a camera is an extension of our body that allows us to share with other memories, permanence and the fight against time passing.

By raising the questions that form the themes of my work I invite the viewer to explore their relationship with themselves, their body and subject of illness. After all… joy, pain, birth and death are our universal experiences.

Inside Out, Series 2014 Digital C-Type Photograph ©palomatendero

Through Myself, Series 2011 Digital C-Type Photograph ©palomatendero

Through Myself, Series 2011 Digital C-Type Photograph ©palomatendero