INTERVIEW TO NATUKA HONRUBIA by Jose Luís Martínez Messeguer
Jose Luís Martínez Messeguer: You are known as working from Valencia. Would you indeed have liked to change location and work from there?
Natuka Honrubia: I’ve been back in my hometown of Valencia for ten years, after one year, 1996‒1997, living in Winchester (England) and 16 years in London, 1998‒2014. I like the fact that my places of residence have exponentially influenced my way of understanding art, looking at it and doing it.
J.L.M.M.: Do you think your career path would have been the same?
N.H.: I have no doubt that if I hadn’t moved to those other cities when I was young, my career wouldn’t have been the same. Over the years, I grew as a person and as an artist in a country with a society that, among other things, was culturally more open than Valencia’s. It’s true that I wasn’t able to make many of the dreams I travelled with come true. I didn’t know how to believe in my artistic worth, and I didn’t learn to enjoy life in London. I closed myself off in a world I decided not to continue living in. But I have certainly managed to very consciously transform everything good and bad that the experience brought me into something beneficial for creating my work today. To this day, the influence of my academic education in England and my years of residence in London are still mentioned with regard to my artistic production, both conceptually and formally.
J.L.M.M.: What drives you to commit yourself to practising art?
N.H.: The need to lend shape to the inhabitants of my inner world, onto which I can pour out my fears, insecurities, insults and torments, forever trying to tighten the screws to make conflicting feelings burst out, both in myself and in the viewer.
J.L.M.M.: What were you yearning for?
N.H.: To confront myself and the onlooker with deeply emotional experiences which, through astonishment and contemplation of what could be described as unpleasant, entice us to carefully discover the multitude of elements in them that, when assembled, shape them and bring them into the world, signifying the stories they seek to reflect, some of them secrets waiting to be revealed. Among my goals, I never forget to depict hints that arouse smiles.
J.L.M.M.: Did you find it?
N.H.: Yes, and in the past 10 years I have granted recognition to my artistic talent, which has led me to lucidly enjoy like never before the freedom and daring with which to create through my art whatever I and the protagonists of my work feel like, and whoever comes after is free to choose their reaction to us!
J.L.M.M.: What do you think can be improved in the art system?
N.H.: Gallery owners, curators, cultural agents and museums should stop being reluctant to promote or re-promote mature artists who, despite the recognition of their artistic quality, for whatever reason have not been able to find their way or to maintain a sustained career in the art world since their youth. Let’s not make the discovery of an older artist extraordinary news; let’s normalise it.
J.L.M.M: What should we add and remove from the system?
N.H.: Opportunities for all good artists regardless of age, gender, race or social status. Don’t make friendships the priority stepping stones to professional recognition; let high-quality artistic production be the guide to get there.
J.L.M.M.: Professional associations: what do you think of them?
N.H.: As an artist, I consider it essential to have professional associations through which we can share concerns, interests and our production; promote exhibitions and exchanges with other members in the cultural sphere, both nationally and internationally; provide legal resources, defend rights that improve our working conditions, and work towards social recognition by opening up art to all audiences.
J.L.M.M.: Tell us a little about your career path.
N.H.: Over the years, my career as an artist has developed through work on sculpture and drawing. The former was much more prominent than the latter until 10 years ago, when I began to work on both disciplines simultaneously, having benefited from each other from the outset, that is, since the last two years of my sculpture specialisation at the San Carlos Faculty of Fine Arts (Valencia). It was then that I began to find what one could understood as my own artistic language, working with iron and making the main subject of my work the people who, having lost their memory and finding themselves isolated from the world, trapped in their own bodies, may perhaps seek the path of death as a way of healing. In 1996‒1997 I did a Master’s of Arts in Sculpture at the Winchester School of Art (England), with a scholarship from the Cañada Blanch Foundation (Valencia), where I learned what was to become fundamental to my education: to strip myself bare through my sculptures and drawings, in any of their aspects, pouring into them without hesitation everything I held back in my guts; I made them scream out the fears of my body and my mind. My work became very dark in appearance and settings over that year. Then the light returned to its surface, only to that, when I became a foundry welding student at the Royal College of Art (London, 1998‒2000), where I learned to work impeccably through the various processes that lead to the creation of works cast in bronze or aluminium. That allowed me to empty out parts of my body to give birth, among other things, to the beings embodying unacceptable desires that broke with the socially prescribed norms in which I had been educated. As a backdrop, there were giant drawings in which the girl-woman, trapped by physical and psychological ties, was doing what she could to find her place in the world.
Since those days until today, producing my work has been a constant in my life. I’m a tireless worker, always on the lookout for new ways to bring the characters from my deepest inner world into the real world, confronting them both with myself and with the viewers, increasingly seeking to challenge us emotionally. Some of them have found their place in awards, scholarships, residencies, and public and private collections, while others have been featured in solo and group exhibitions. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to walk the continuous, straight line that will lead me to the just recognition that I believe the quality of my artistic production deserves; my career is still waiting for it, deeply involved in achieving it.
Don’t forget, my name is Natuka. Don’t forget me.
J.L.M.M.: Define yourself through hashtags or labels.
N.H.: There are a lot of labels I use in my work, particularly in my drawings, and which define me: Just Natuka Honrubia Zaragoza, Natuka, Foxy Lady, Fit Chick, Porky, Canine, Bitch, I’m a pig, yes!, Like No Other, Fine and Secure, How pretty I am, I love myself so much, How good-looking I am, Affectionate, 25417625-A, Bad Girl, etc.
J.L.M.M.: What are the themes in your artistic work?
N.H.: My life, my way of living it, who I am and what I’m like, how I see and interpret my inner world, my stance in the outside world, and, furthermore, the way both worlds affect me. With all of this, I create stories that are life rafts for my body and mind, and I hope that, in one way or another, they call on the viewers to reflect on them, to open their eyes and be amazed by what they give rise to within them; their reaction is also a theme in my work.
J.L.M.M.: Any project pending? What would you like to do?
N.H.: I have an exhibition planned for a public institution that will be a long tour around my artistic career.
J.M.M.: One wish.
N.H.: I hope a good gallery will finally take a chance on my work, so I can give it a voice beyond my studio!