Pía Ortuño is a Costa Rican artist currently living and working in London. She graduated from the University of Costa Rica with a BA in fine arts (2019) and later moved to Pietrasanta, Italy to work and learn ancient marble and bronze techniques. She apprenticed under Jimenez Deredia in his Carrara studio and worked at the Fonderia Artistic Mariani (2020).
Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at Fold Gallery in London.
Through the spiritual rituals taught to me as a child in Costa Rica, I find and collect, unearth and reveal pockets of time. I listen to the echos of post-colonial religious iconography, colour, and architecture as well as pre-Columbian rituals and bridge these conversations with those of material exploration.
In an ensemble of painting, sculpture, and installation, I navigate dimensions of time, the possibilities in ritualistic repetition, and the aesthetics of spirituality. By experimenting and transforming materiality, I challenge the linear notions of time and embed surfaces with my own history and traditions alongside their own. The alchemical processes that I condemn my materials to endure seek a form of creation that is an ever changing process of deconstruction and becoming. I seek to excite the viewers curiosity and admiration of the elemental.
In this volatile and saturated world, I find relief and calm in the simple smell of salt, the slow oxidising of nails, and the narratives of time in these portals. I have wondered how slowly I can provoke time to pass, how much attention it is willing to give. I encourage the viewer to explore these harrowing and salty landscapes, to look deep into the cavernous holdings and seek the objects that layer personal and collective memory, and to let time pass through the work and onto themselves.
Look up, now look down.
Repurposed ceiling wood beams sprinkled with a year’s worth of studio debris.
A mountain of salt, breaking a blue surface. Unhinged, bent, broken. Or maybe holding it together. Salting the wound.
And what is inside the little blue piece? A nail? A million nails? Ordinary is beautiful.
Orange rust, eating away a cooper plate. Tasting green.
Installation comprised of four pieces of work.
Installation at Safehouse 1, Peckham, London.
