Taxinomie

Laura Sanchez Filomeno is a multidisciplinary artist, who mainly uses hair as a basic material, taking nature as a source of inspiration. In his work, different concepts mingle, like a weave, exploring questions linked in a paradoxical way: attraction and repulsion, the sublime and the obscene, the sacred and the profane. Like Alice, Lewis Caroll's character, Laura Sánchez Filomeno helps us to see the other side of the mirror and to face the contradictions that exist in our apprehension of certain works, attracting the eye as much as they disturbing.

His work, composed of embroidered hair, magnifying glasses, stainless steel elements, shells as well as silver and gold leaves, mixes organic and mineral materials, diverted from their original function, giving the illusion of new species. The magnifying glass system, borrowed from scientific laboratories, allows us to understand embroidery in another way and to change our perception.

The artist partly finds his inspiration in the field of science: biology, botany or geography, his works sometimes recalling lichens, plants or imaginary maps. She is also interested in collections and the principles of classification of species, old encyclopedias, naturalist engravings and illustration plates, herbaria and molecular biology books. There taxonomy is in fact the science of classification. In 1728, Carl von Linnaeus designed a classification of plants and referenced his work in Hortus Uplandicus. He is to botany what Darwin is to natural sciences with The Origin of Species in 1859, and will greatly influence the work of Laura Sánchez Filomeno.

Hair, used as a material, dyed and here used as embroidery thread, is not a trivial material. Taming it and preparing it, weaving it or constraining it amounts to taming the animal part of humans. The history of hair is eminently political, symbolic and loaded with meaning, beyond hair fashions.

Cabinets of curiosities are also sources of creative ideas for the artist to exploit. In these places protected from view, intimate, open only to initiates, collectors exhibited for their guests naturalias and artificialias, at the crossroads of the natural and artificial world, sciences and arts. Thus, the works of Laura Sánchez Filomeno are imbued with all these concepts, offering to the eye a clever mix between materials from the human body and her know-how as an embroiderer in the artifact that she offers the public to observe at the same time. magnifying glass, like a new hybrid species, strange and fascinating.