Donna Huanca
FIBULA, 2018
Oil, sand on digital print on canvas
160 x 124 cm
The fibula is the smaller of two bones running between the knee and the ankle. It is not a weight-bearing bone but connects muscles together. The word is Latin, meaning brooch or clasp; turning the noun to a verb — ‘to clasp’ — the word perhaps becomes closest to Huanca’s FIBULA.
Below the layers of paint, pigment and sand in her signature shades of blue sits a digital print. Huanca has used close up photographs of the skin of performers, documented as they inhabit her installations as painted sculptures and transposed them onto canvas. She regards skin ‘as a universal tissue that bonds all humans’.1 The importance she places on this material can be seen in the way she paints directly onto skin and incorporates bodily presence and senses like sound, smell and touch in her work. By including the digital print Huanca also makes her canvasses function like an extension of the skin. The paint is ‘clasping’ onto the presence of a body, as it also carries forward information from a previous live performance. The ephemeral experience is preserved by the brushstrokes like muscle memory.
1 Huanca in conversation with Venus Lau, CURA.27, 2018. Available atwww.curamagazine.com/digital/donna-huanca/