Agustina Woodgate

The action consisted in sandpapering down all four large walls of one of the classrooms, gathering together the resulting dust and placing it atop the two ledges of a green blackboard found in the same classroom, in the manner of small mounds of chalk dust.
In another very small room, a globe which had also been sanded down rested on a wooden table. The artist had left the dust residue around the globe as a trail of bluish dust on the table. The walls and the globe interconnected fortuitously through the color and the texture resulting from the process of sanding, but in both cases, the idea of revealing the interior of things, eliminating layers, or erasing past experiences through removal were key concepts.
Woodgate’s work suggests processes of collective memories, spatial-temporal encounters between the artist, the work and the viewer. The point of departure for her recent work was the notion of displacing concepts and reinserting them in other contexts. Thus, the dust from the walls transformed into chalk dust poetically alluded to the words which had been written, deleted and forgotten, establishing a connection with the space itself, in this case, the school, and with all the personal experiences that these walls once witnessed. Woodgate is also concerned with playing with the object that has been found, manipulated and reused, and with the intrinsic poetry in it. Her oeuvre is full of obsessive processes, which imply in many cases the demanding physicality of the artist’s work, including the collection of things and objects, in a sort of continuous life performance. Examples of this are her collecting human hair for years; sewing together giant grass blades for months; collecting cuddly toys, unstitching them and then using them to make hand-sewn rugs, or sandpapering gigantic walls until stripping them naked. These are some of the strategies with which Woodgate feels at ease, as if an essential part of art resided in that laborious endeavor of having and doing, perhaps even more so than in the end result of the finished work.