Catalina Renjifo
Whose work are you loving these days?
Cally Shadbolt. We run the Artists’ Salon together, a series of open art crits at Magdalen Road Studios. Cally’s work is everything I aspire mine to be: coherent, considered and articulated with specific materials. Check her out!
What book is on your nightstand?
I have two paperbacks. I love the fact that they are both recommendations from my kids. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomy Adeyemi, is a modern story about a Yoruba kingdom, where a black teenage girl is going to discover her power, I think. My daughter loved it and keeps asking me if I have started it yet, but I am very slowly getting through books. That’s because I am reading All Quiet on the Western Front [by Erich Maria Remarque] which my son read before me. It is a painful, relentless read, and it makes me feel hopeless.
I also have my backlit Kindle, so when the lights go out I can indulge in serious topics that hopefully will make me fall asleep, or even better, fuel my insomnia. At the moment I am alternating between [Gaston] Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art, both books have distinct styles that have to be navigated to get at the meaning.
Your practice in 5 #
#embodied
#digestive
#researchbased
#contemporary
#experimental
What’s on your mind?
I am thinking about funding for artists in Oxford, how difficult it is to justify when there is a perception of wealth in the city.
How does the body - yours and others' - influence your work?
Gesture, scale, proximity, dexterity, persistence: bodies transform matter for other bodies to perceive, negotiate, empathise, traverse. The body is key.
Catalina lives and works in Oxford, UK.
March 2020
