Terra Incognita

In a time when there are eighty million refugees on the globe, one can ask: What is a known land? What is land that belongs to a person or a group, when the tectonic shifts of populations in the world follow political earthquakes almost on a daily basis?  

The first steps for creating this body of work began with the study of areas where humans had never set foot, places that had never been explored in ancient maps. They are enigmatic, exposed, belonging to no one – marked on the map as terra incognita – unknown land. The concept of terra incognita, which originated in the language of geography, expanded over the years to psychology and the research of the subconscious. Ever since she was a child, the artist has been fascinated by these areas, scary and free at the same time, open to the imagination and not governed by any rules.

The initial motivation was to study that lost territory and create a personal map, a mirror to the artist's soul, allowing her to give free rein to the unknown places of the work through an unplanned, intuitive action freed from the need to conform to any rules. Thus, new topographies began to take form: bursts of color, lines, forms, stains and flow. 

It was a meditative process of connecting to inner places, an exploration of her innermost home. The artist strived to break free from familiar trails and wander about, losing perceptions and norms, creating a new path where she would walk and feel at home.

The creative process produced a new land, a personal, private territory based on an inner language, where geographical layers are mixed with the artist's own repository of memories and experiences. The present body of work is based on the semantics and language of geographical maps, through which the artist wishes to explore her own inner map, as a self-portrait of the unconscious, a home for the language of her soul.