Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa
ARTIST STATEMENT
I work with impermanent materials, such as candy, fruit, earth, and fireworks. By working with ephemera I seek intense aesthetic experiences in time. I enjoy how an ephemeral work may make us acutely aware of the present moment, as well as transport us to emotions and associations drawn from our past.
My practice enacts the connection between art and research. I combine academic research with fieldwork by visiting and spending time in communities while I develop my ideas and visual language. For example, the installations Casa Cunas, Children’s Tears Laid Out to Dry, and Eating Hearts That Shine Like Snow, came out of research into the high rate of child kidnappings in Guatemala City. I spent months interviewing policemen, mothers, and children, and visiting the sites of operating ‘illegal orphanages’. When I started my research, I didn’t have a predetermined opinion on the situation, a plan, nor what form the installations would take. I simply talked to people, and observed social rituals. Through this fieldwork I came to my own aesthetic and emotional conclusions.
Though my creative process is committed to experimentation and research, and my subject matter often deals with things such as the Guatemalan Civil War, the results are often absurd and humorous. I have found that refugees and survivors of war are often that way; nothing in life is ever so dire as to be unworthy of a joke or two.