Marina González Guerreiro’s creative territory could well be defined as opposing forces held in balance: precariousness and refinement, reuse and construction, memory and anticipation. In her work, beauty does not lie in aesthetic perfection but in the traces and the materials that withstand the passing of time.
González Guerreiro frames her practice within these coordinates: composing with what she comes across, making deterioration visible and building with her hands without erasing their traces. Leftovers, the humble and the forgotten are turned into bearers of a past, present and future coexistence.
Her installations take shape through a process of accumulation, like an ongoing archive–scenography. One gesture prompts the next in a measured, finely-tuned interplay. The materials — plastics, metals, ropes, ceramics, organic residues (sticks, leaves, flowers, seeds) — coexist with objects that bring to mind things like wheels, weather vanes, clocks, plumb lines and water vessels. She uses them to construct an idealized nature imbued with references to the domestic and the sacred. Wild flowers conjure the act of offering and our connection to the ephemeral, while water suggests the ritual of purification and a symbol of flow.
And although The Wait, The Flow, The Measure brings us closer to an ecology more attuned to the fragility of time, water transcends its condition as a mere medium.
The Wait
González Guerreiro’s studio is full of boxes containing objects such as rope and threads, sticks and branches, flowers, bowls and vessels. Ordinary materials carefully stored, patiently awaiting their transformation. As such, the workshop fulfils the functions of an archive, a laboratory and a refuge. A place where residues find redemption.
Waiting is not a question of stretching out time but of inhabiting it. The wait becomes an ethical practice: looking at what others throw away and conferring dignity on material considered “out of place”. Each fragment retains its history and its visible time. Care is revealed in that patient attentiveness: a poetics of mending, recomposing and letting the material speak for itself.
The Flow
Spring, puddle, torrent, drop or pond: in whatever guise, water sets its own rhythm. It manifests as a substance that flows and becomes permanent through repetition, returning and reshaping the space it passes through.
Her vessel-works —holy-water stoups, wishing wells, earthenware jars— hold water or allow it to pass through. They are explorations of what flows, disperses or evaporates. They attest to the provisionality of every measurement and the illusoriness of any attempt to control time. Water acts as a philosophy of relation: fluid, porous and interdependent.
The Measure
González Guerreiro’s interventions in artefacts —wheels, water clocks— evince the limits of their precision. The attempt to measure the ungraspable —knotting, passing beads— discloses the fragility of control and turns attention and contemplation into a means through which one relates to the work and to the rhythm dictated by the material.
