Can art change us? Freud concluded it can: “External stimuli can bring the most hidden psychic tensions to the surface,” he wrote when examining Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva, A Pompeian Fantasy (1903), based on a Roman bas-relief of a woman moving forward—also known as she who walks or the one who advances (1). When the artist Nina Surel first encountered Gradiva, she too was deeply moved.
Surel’s practice seeks to record the temporalities that inhabit our bodies: aging, hardening, scarring, and mutation. She explores the feminine, with its myths and rituals, and is drawn to the resilience of the human body, the persistence of life, the resistance of the soul, the legacy of past lives, and the possibility of reinventing oneself through a deeper, more intimate—yet collective—search.
From performances and video installations, Surel’s work has transitioned to tangible ceramic sculptures. In her Core Series, she began by molding individual pieces on the pelvises of a group of women. These forms became containers—literal and symbolic—of her message of strength and growth, stacked to create towering totems. Recently, her work has evolved further into narrative murals.
Surel’s belief in the power of community and collaboration also motivated her to found The Collective 62, the first feminine art collective in Miami. This art complex includes studios and exhibition spaces, fostering a supportive environment where women artists can create, connect, and share their work.
Motherhood has been the seed through which her work has grown. She has collected memories, experiences, and narratives—told and untold—and held them in these vessels. This seed, like a vine, intertwines countless elements, and the vessels become wombs of stories, fragmented now into rivers of possibilities in her bas-relief murals.
In Allegory of Florida (2023), Surel imagines a symbiotic relationship between species, fostering solidarity and binding humans, animals, and myths of the land, guided by divine feminine knowledge.
Her new mural, Greta Chamotta, draws its name from two sources: the Greek legacy of classical sculpture and the grog (chamote in Spanish) obtained by crushing red clay fired at high temperatures. In this work, a group of women advances alongside animals, plants, and body parts. Recurring themes such as fertility, the limits of individuation, and intimate processes of the self multiplying and expanding toward others are central. Protagonists include Atabei, the ancestral mother of the Taíno people, and the breast-shaped fruit of the Attalea palm tree, native to Mexico, Central, and South America. Complementing the mural is a collection of ceramic tablets, sculptures, and vessels, which extend the narrative, offering additional textures and symbols that deepen the exploration of Surel’s themes, as part of her first solo show, Greta Chamotta/Great Love, at Art Basel Miami Beach, presented by Spinello Projects.
As in her previous mural, the ceramic pieces in Greta Chamotta do not touch. The spaces between them offer multiple possibilities for connection within the narratives carried by the grog, now returned to clay, molded, fired, and colored. The process, from initial sketch to finished piece, involves many stages: over 200 pieces are molded in clay, sanded, painted with underglazes, bisque-fired for approximately nine hours, and kiln-fired for another 10 to 12 hours.
In this time of human and ecological emergency, we may “seek the nature, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story,” as Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (2). Surel invites us to collectively open our senses and continue knotting life stories.
Many hands are now called to assist the eternally busy mother, she seems to say.
SAVE THE DATE:
What: Greta Chamotta/Great Love by Nina Surel presented by Spinello Projects | Art Basel Miami Beach | Booth N11
When: December 6 - 8, 2024
Time: from 11 am to 6 pm
Where: 1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139
References:
- Gradiva: The Cure Through Love, Freud Museum London,
https://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/gradiva/. 2007-08. - Le Guin, Ursula K, Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ignota, 2019
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