Isabel Miquel Arqués
SPAIN
Instagram @isabelmiquelarques
Born in Lleida (Spain), Isabel Miquel Arqués is a fine art photographer, visual artist, writer and storyteller. Daughter of a concert grade pianist mother and a businessman father and amateur photographer, her father gave her her first camera at the age of ten, a Kodak Instamatic 25 (still on her desk).
Isabel started her career as photo assistant and gallery assistant in Spain. She has lived in Barcelona, Amsterdam and London. Mother of four children she works and lives since 2005 in Antwerp (Belgium), where she has developed her artistic career.
Isabel finds her own way between tradition and modernity.
She is in search for the soul in the medium of photography. The strength that resides in fragility, beauty and poetry. With attention to materiality, transparency, texture and tactility, she approaches her prints as physical objects, sculptures present in time and space, emphasizing the idea that imperfections and traces have to be seen and not hidden, as traces make us who we are.
Isabel is currently working on a trilogy of visual artistic dialogues with three iconic women, Karen Blixen, Virginia Woolf, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Three women that have always been part of her universe.
• SERIES •
De Memoria / By Heart
The english expression of the Spanish "De Memoria" is By Heart, which I find fascinating, as the latin origin of the Spanish word "recordar"(to remember) is "recordari" (meaning: formed again) and 'cordis" (heart). The result couldn't be more inspiring, to remember means "go through the heart again", to think with the heart. What do we remember? How do we remember? Does memory expand on a general view of a memory through detail, or does it concentrate on a particular universe in a detail, in an object, in a corner of the scene?
Having its definition as starting point, De Memoria/ By Heart,consist of a series of images (more than the ones I could send in the application) based on these questions through family photos and objects from the past. Its process and its path in memory is the starting point of new images.
Their exectuton is related to the way I believe we remember, in layers. The images are printed on tracing paper which through its materiality and transparency allow us to "see" how we recall, which can be logical and absurd.
You will find on my website a more detailed explanation of this concept, from display to the viewer immersion. How do we rememeber not only places and objects but also individuals.Portraits based on the character features with which memory associates the portrayed person and where, taken to the extreme, the physical appearence becomes secondary.
