Amaru

Amaru

About the artist

Since she was very young, Amaru showed a great ability for creating things by drawing, sewing, and building. Throughout her school years, she excelled at daydreaming. Even though school was not a welcoming place for imaginative children like her, art was one of the subjects she truly enjoyed. While pursuing a construction degree in college, she decided to take drawing lessons at the School of Fine Arts in Vina del Mar.
Later she discovered street theater and dropped out of college to work performing in the streets of Santiago. Working with TEUCO and Sociedad Anonima, two street theater troupes, was her first real art school. Mask and prop designing, dance and singing, stilt walking, acrobatics and acting were part of everyday training for performances, giving Amaru a tremendous experience in the arts. Living under a dictatorship, which brutally repressed any sign of dissent, marked her understanding of the power of art. Thus, aesthetics, content and function concepts regarding artistic expression were imbued during these years.
In 1992 she moved to Minneapolis, USA and while working as a mime and Spanish teacher, she studied and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and an MFA with a concentration in painting and drawing.
Currently she works as a painter in Concon, Chile.    

Birth name: Marcela Jazmín Rodríguez Aguilar

About the work

Latin America conserves its ancestral secrets in uncommon urns, made of the purest, eternal clay. Urns that are the exuberance of its natural world, the uncontainable din of elements that inhabit in its restless body, since time immemorial,  the immeasurable diversity that fills its corners with unheard of surprises.  That stores human activity which has not perished in the face of adversity, injustice, deceit and cruelty.

Every now and then individuals appear with the ability to submerge themselves in the most intimate aspects of Life, to feel the deep pulse of the elements, the faint whisper of our people, and bring these secrets face to face with our senses.  They reveal them with sweet adventure, with solemn trembling, and we are able to rediscover our own identity, held captive by the bustle and illusion of Progress.

This time, Amaru reminds who we are, surrounding us with the strong and unmistakable aroma of moist soil, of the inexhaustible vegetation of this South, full of mysteries and epiphanies.  This South where diffuse people and myths blend in the mist and the imaginary is as real as a burning tire on a highway incited by a protest.  Because it is here that magic resists and is raised as a banner to preserve the most important elements of a human group- its cosmogony, its beliefs and interpretations of life, its most intense collective pains and joys.

Amaru, devotee of her continent (it is not in vain that she was born at the end of the world) uses her well-aimed shamanic paintbrush to reinterpret these myths for us, this imaginary world so fundamental to our existence in which the original inhabitant stirs and resides in the voice of the fields, the islands, the forests and the deserts.   Her impeccable execution takes us along symbolic paths, almost surrealist, where characters have their own norms of existence and their own spaces are always shared with the natural world.

The woman, almost alluding to the same author, does not seek self-reference but rather the opposite- the opening through where, from the feminine and the intimate, one descends towards the absoluteness of fertility, of germination and, finally, to our maternal earth.   It is here where the visual discourse inundates all vital aspects, inevitably develops and comes to life in our sensibilities.  It is where we are invited to become part of a past that is lost in some forgotten indigenous cemetery or in the nervous flight of a hummingbird.  In the process, we return to being a part of the whole and recover the holistic view and ubiquity.

Although it may be only for a moment, communing with Amaru´s work manifests our distinctness and we feel the jubilation to be alive and to be substantially unique. In this singularity we can find all that is necessary which the earth bestows on us and for which our only responsibility is to share it in a fair and generous manner.

Thus, upon returning to the hustle and bustle of the 21st Century, individualism and existential isolation may blind us again, burying us in cement and slicing the threads of the ritual in which Amaru has immersed us in. We may be left dangling in front of some cold screen yet, without a doubt, at nighttime our dreams will be more intense and a new seed will germinate in our bosoms.

Radye SIlva Risco

Visual Artist