Macarena Rojas Osterling is a Peruvian visual artist who works in the mediums of painting, drawing, mixed media works on paper and photographs that explore the interconnectedness and duality of her experience as both artist and mother.
In a similar vein to the automatic drawings of the surrealists, Rojas Osterling's practice embodies streams of consciousness on paper, with her drawings acting as a space in which the artist allows herself to lose control and temporarily free herself from the demands of domestic life. This intuitive way of working is paired almost paradoxically with a sense of careful observation and seemingly mathematical technicality. This controlled chaos parallels Rojas Osterling's experience of balancing the demands of motherhood and the mundane chaos that brings, with the challenge of maintaining an artistic practice.
The intricate interlacing of the webs, networks and grids that make up Rojas Osterling's drawings come together to form compositions that straddle the border between disorder and control. Using architectural precision in conjunction with fluid free drawing, the works have an organic quality to them, as well as a rawness that echoes a mind in a chronic state of interruption, the mind of a mother. The very materials themselves become a receptacle of emotions, an antidote to anxiety, a space of thought, a place to scream, a private space and a daily ritual.
Rojas Osterling is formally trained in architecture, with photography being her entry-point into a fine art practice. These architectural elements as well as the photographic works throughout the artist's oeuvre serve as concrete and tangible points of grounding within a series of works based upon ideas of chaos, interruption and the impermanent. The artist weaves an intimate story that is deeply personal to her own experiences as artist, woman, and mother - but also speaks to a universal human condition of existing within modern society.