Alba Urquia

Mimicking Sisyphus perpetual struggle to push a rock uphill, I strived to make a boulder my size. Each iteration was an attempt to reach my own top of the hill, that is why I regard each "boulder" as an "ascension" followed by a number -the times I tried to build one-.

The making process became a performance of what it takes to become stone myself, experimenting with different materials, finishes and scale each time. This body of work is a never-ending piece, a lifetime work in progress, just like Sisyphus eternal punishment, there are endless attempts, and due to its performatic nature, it might never be completed.

This collection of lithographs completes the boulders created for "A face that toils so close to stones...".

Once again the repetition of a -perhaps- absurd task, and physically demanding process brings me closer to this transmutation. When transferring the body parts to the surface of the stone, the skin becomes that of the limestone. Lithographic reticulations and a grainy grease-attracting areas are the new epidermis. I am that which I do: my hands get shaped by the irregular contour of each limestone, my back hurts from bowing to the stone, my legs get sturdy after all the graining, and my arms are constantly soar, like a latent indicator that the transmutation is about to take place.

How much time do I have before I become stone myself?

“One sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over, one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay covered mass, the foot wedging it the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands.(...) A face that toils so close to stone is already stone itself”

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

This artefact consists of a Jesmonite box with an engraved title in its lid that reads "how I became who I am", and 10 meters of typewritten Kitakata paper.

The text is a journal of my transmutation into stone in the shape of an ancient worn out object containing primordial knowledge. It describes the steps I take to create the boulders for "A face that toils so close to stones" and the lithographs for "Is already stone itself" in addition to the reflections I came up with during the making process. Writing this publication served me to monitor my progress as well as how I endured such physical work, my commitment to the medium and each stage of the transmutation. I believe it narrates who I am, in as much as how those tasks shaped me the way I am now. In a nutshell: the narration of a stone's erosion through time.

Edition of 5

“By the end of this journey, I will have spent so much time with the limestone, that I will resemble one. My hands, and arms will be a portrait of my endurance, as it will be reflected on my face and my back, and the strong feet that supported me. I will proof once again, my life-time commitment to the medium and to the printing press. I will become that which I do. I am my struggle, I am stone myself.”

Fragment of "How I became who I am"

This diptych symbolises the universal relation between one and one's own existence. The circle represents the struggle inherent to human condition: to exist and find meaning to existence. It is depicted as a circle in an attempt to mimic Sisyphus' rock, which is used in the myth as a metaphor of the struggle.

In the first print, the struggle is bigger than the entity, the individual is completely overtaken by the weight of its own condition.

In the second print, the entity is physically over the struggle, it has come to terms with the nature of their relation: the struggle is fundamental to its existence, one simply needs to live with it.

This print initiated the body of work that explores the relation between the human condition and its meaning. The circle symbolises Sisyphus' rock, a metaphor used in the myth to talk about the struggle that it is to exist.

“I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step towards the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the laris of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.” - 'The Myth of Sisyphus' by A. Camus

This quote describing Sisyphus' descent is nothing else but the realisation that the struggle is fundamental to existence, that there is not one without the other. Accepting this condition and mutual dependency is the only way out.

These ceramics are the conclusive piece of the Body as Vessel, a body of work that I developed during my first year at the RCA where I explored the "vessel" as a metaphor of the body considered in phenomenology a tool to explore and interact the material world around us.

Existence is illusory or it is eternal. 

This quote by Camus proposes two ways to understand existence as we know it -in a physical realm-: a shared illusion, a visual trick upon which we all agreed, or a temporal stage of an immortal condition.

What happens when consciousness transcends?

Vessels are left behind, in the physical realm -they are of no use anymore.

Deprived of consciousness, even its still life nature will succumb

to the erosion of the centuries.

Messengers of primordial knowledge,

and individual experience,

vehicles to access the world at hand,

witnesses of an existence,

covered in pebbles, dust and sand

for however long this may stand.