Tatiana Sarasa
For Tatiana Sarasa, making begins with listening. To the earth she gathers, the fibres she processes, the plants she grows for colour. Based in Mallorca since 1992, the artist moves between painting, textiles and installation, exploring how materials connect us to place, memory and one another.
“It is the material that inspires me. I let it lead, and from there the work emerges,” she explains. Where an idea once determined her choice of materials, today the encounter with a particular earth, fibre or pigment sets the work in motion.
Her exhibition Ocre et lait, at ABA ART in Palma, grows from ochre earth collected in Mallorca, carried from the Sahara by winds thousands of years ago. These warm, soft tones meet tempera on glass, oil wax on paper, beeswax, brass and linen in an installation shaped by tenderness, nourishment and ancestral memory. The funnel appears as a recurring form: open at both ends, it allows passage, giving and receiving. Through it, Sarasa reflects on breastfeeding and the intimate acts of care that sustain life.
“Being in conversation is, for me, an act of listening and respect. The earth I collect, the fibres I process, have so much to tell us. I don’t want to impose a narrative on them.”
Her relationship with natural colour began through knitting. Searching for natural fibres and botanical colours, she founded Purl & Poem, dyeing yarn herself with plants, many gathered on the island. Years spent at the studio stove revealed colour as something delicate and changeable. Today, she works exclusively with natural pigments and inks. In her small garden, she also grows Japanese indigo, accompanying the plant through cultivation and pigment extraction, a practice of observation and care that deepens her understanding of what she holds in her hands.
Time remains visible in these materials. A fading colour or changing surface becomes part of the work’s life, asking its owner to pay attention. “I am interested in the experience, in creating a new relationship between the person and the artwork,” she says. “To live with it and grow old with it. Nothing is eternal; neither are we.”
This intimacy with matter extends to her defence of handwork. Stitching, dyeing and weaving offer rhythms through which she finds calm and connection. “Our hands connect us with our rhythms, with nature, with who we are.” Through Open Studio 79, the creative space she founded in Palma, she has shared that conviction through natural fibres, botanical colour and craft.
Sarasa’s practice resonates with NOIR Mud Silk’s attention to earth, cloth and the origins of colour. Beauty carries a responsibility to care: for materials, for the landscapes they come from, and for the knowledge held in making.
Ocre et lait can be visited at ABA ART, Palma, until December 18.
Portraits: Gourab Ganguli. Exhibition photographs: Vincent Andert, courtesy of ABA ART.