Ceballos begins the pieces from this body of work through repetition processes that retrieve memory. However, while repeating, memory loss arises, but so do differences. Acknowledging this, the series of twenty-five concrete sculptures titled Repetición #1-25 (work in process) are a three-dimensional image of her body, which begins as body casts that are then used as lost wax molds. The crash paintings (work in process) use the same materials as the sculptures but in a two-dimensional image. As their title suggests, the images created are a result of the artist crashing her body into the dried materials, provoking some pieces to fall. Here, her main interest is the image that appears on the canvas after the impact, only visible after all concrete falls, the image that will be revealed with time. In the case of the piece Habitación 04/02/2022____to be drawn in 40 days (work in process), the artist repeats by hand the same actions using what she has come to think of as rules from Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968). The process involves a degree of complexity, since the artist must memorize the physical movements she will make, emphasizing also that the making process is the one recovering memory and not the drawing itself.
In past concrete pieces, the artist left the modification of the material to the climatic conditions where the pieces were located, but now she controls what happens. The installation named Atmospheric Mechanism programs and studies the atmospheric time of a day she experienced in Glasgow; it reproduces the same day in a space that gathers the past, present and future again and again, all through artificial rain and fog. Through memory, Ceballos wants to bring something personal to the present. As that memory continues to be constantly relived, the sculptures will start transitioning into a white color, due to its property salt. The concrete’s constant changing nature is relevant for the project because its change of colour speaks of the duality between black and white; and the salt, according to alchemy, speaks of femininity and the soul. Altogether, they will eventually help join Ceballos’ body and soul.
As the end of the show’s path approaches, Ceballos decides time’s destiny, hence becoming “God to a fragment of time”* as she shares a 24 hour-recording (bent in 12 hours) of a landscape where Repetición #7/25 appears. The landscape is part of Eye’s (Suffolk) surroundings, the final stop after a six hour-long car journey from Glasgow to England, where she left behind the piece. Two overlapped times and videos can be seen subtly, as one runs the normal course of time (from past to future), and the other runs backwards (from future to past).
PLACE BECOMES TIME
SPACE BECOMES MINE**
(*The Place of Death Roads, William Burroughs)
(**Excerpt from Just Drifting, Psychic TV)
In words of Mauricio Rocha, architect:
One day a young architect arrived at my studio from Monterrey, what made her stand out from the other architects was being recommended by a great friend and architect, Agustín Landa Vértiz, who was always very rigorous in his recommendations and critical judgments about creativity and thought in our architectural work, so without hesitation I received Yolanda to collaborate in the workshop.
Yolanda was always very discreet and focused on the work of our workshop, what surprised me at the same time was the series of photographs that she took. The series enunciated an inner world that is not easy to express in the world of photography, which I know well from my relationship with my mother's and my own work.
Since I started studying architecture, I was always interested in interdisciplinary exploration and in parallel to my studies and the beginning of my career I was involved making interventions of specific sites in spaces dedicated to art, as well as to photography, cinema and other artistic expressions, I understood that my creative motivation was in the construction of the spatial experience and its atmospheres.
I try to transmit to my students this interest and condition so important in my work, when I am at the academy, and to my collaborators in the day-to-day work at my studio. With Yolanda that happened more intensely when seeing her great potential through her ability to transmit in her photographs.
Since Yolanda parted her own way, whenever I went to Monterrey, or she came to Mexico City we met to follow this endless conversation about interdisciplinary work and the difficult path to the inner world. At the same time, I was surprised to see Yolanda very committed to her work, with a practice that is profound and full of content. Today her work is a resounding reality.
Yolanda has found the place where the dividing line between disciplines is blurred, where architecture and art are blurred by each other. In her work, the body occupies space and signifies it, memory and time appear provoking the intangible experience, the ritual becomes present and is perceived in the essence that builds the spatial structure made of matter and light, achieving the most difficult and precious thing for those who pass through her artworks: the experience of a deep and intense atmosphere. Transcendence happens when time is relative in a constant exploration with the senses.
The work of Yolanda Ceballos transits and flies trapping the perception of others, of herself, towards the difficult task of touching the timeless. Today I am grateful to receive the great strength that Yolanda gives us through her work, to be able to follow this interminable conversation about the important interdisciplinary task to transmit our thoughts and share with our work experiences that build us as an intergenerational community.
