Teresita Fernández: Astral Sea
Lehmann Maupin, London
September 5 – 21, 2024
Lehmann Maupin presents Astral Sea, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Teresita Fernández. Featuring a series of glazed ceramic pieces and new sculptural paper panels, Astral Sea extends the artist’s interests in the confluence points of the cosmos, land, and water, as seen through the lens of an embodied sculptural landscape.
Astral Sea inaugurates Lehmann Maupin’s temporary location at No.9 Cork Street, located in the heart of Mayfair, while the gallery’s permanent space at Cromwell Place undergoes renovation this fall. Concurrent to the exhibition, Teresita Fernández’s work is on view at SITE Santa Fe in the two-artist exhibition Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson. Co-curated by Teresita Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the exhibition features over 30 of her works and marks the first time Robert Smithson’s oeuvre has been placed in conversation with an artist working today.
Throughout her practice, Teresita Fernández has concerned herself with the ambulatory viewer, situating her work so that it is brought to life by the individual’s movement around the gallery. With these shifting vantage points, people’s reflections move across the surfaces of the work; depending on one’s location, the artist’s materials either reveal or conceal themselves from view. This physical engagement is akin to how we wayfind in or navigate the world around us, making evident our connectivity to the universe—the stars, tides, and slow time of geology. In this way, Teresita Fernández’s works embody the phrase: “Nothing rests; Everything moves; Everything vibrates.”1
This continuous, flowing movement is the starting point for Astral Sea—a phrase that Teresita Fernández feels speaks to the ephemerality of both the sky and water. Visible from the gallery’s windows are two new glazed ceramic works: Astral Sea 1 and Astral Sea 2, made from thousands of tiny glazed ceramic tesserae, with imagery that is at once deeply familiar yet ambiguous. The saturated blues suggest a flowing river connecting the two panels, earthen copper/brown hints at land masses, and deep greens become blooming organic matter. At the same time, these works could depict a galaxy, creating an “as above, so below” vertiginous topography that refuses to ground the viewer in a single recognizable location. The ceramic pieces are placed in the path of the sun, causing shifting light to add dynamism to the glossy surface of the tiles. As the viewer approaches the works, their silhouettes move across the variegated surface, activating the shimmering minerality of the glazes. These works are never still; they vibrate. As a result, Astral Sea 1 and 2 exist on both macro and micro registers. The individual tiles coalesce to form a whole, transforming the intimately microscopic into the immensely vast.
Another reference point for the exhibition is the phrase Stella Maris, which translates to “star of the sea” and speaks to the feminine qualities universally associated with water. This “star of the sea” is evident in a series of new sculptural paper panels titled Stella Maris(Net). While the glazed ceramic panels open onto vast worlds, these sculptural paper panels conceal something, creating liminal spaces between what can and cannot be known. Created through an accumulation of paper pulp and pigments, each work becomes a palimpsest where multiple layers are hidden from view, like invisible geologies. Networks of airy white lines and points (possible stars, galaxies, or wave breaks) unfold atop blue-gray grounds, and upon close inspection, the ink seeps into the crevices of the paper, turning the works into physical, sculptural objects. Atop the paper are handwoven nets made from Kozo fibers, which are tethered to fixed points, draping over the surface to create veils obscuring sections of the imagery below. The patterns in the paper and the weave of the nets intersect, prompting the viewers’ eyes to remain in motion. This active looking reinforces the fact that nothing is simultaneously accessible. The viewer’s eye is kept in perpetual motion as the works slowly unravel rather than immediately reveal themselves.
The net motif reappears in the freestanding sculpture Tether(Flotsam and Jetsam), which anchors the exhibition, grounding the ephemerality of the accompanying works. A concrete geometric form sits on the floor, recalling a monumental and faceted dark gray gemstone. The surface exposes fragments of white sand that have been cast into the dark concrete, suggesting infinite constellations. The base of the sculpture is tilted to reveal that it is not entirely resting on the floor, but rather being pulled upward towards the ceiling by a directional rope. On the opposite end of the rope are suspended nets that seemingly hover, yet remain tethered. The base functions like a mooring anchor, while the nets’ buoyancy allows them to float up to the surface of an imagined water line. Additionally, the nets are laden with rock-like crystalline minerals, including azurite and malachite. Glistening like suspended points of light, these elements unify the bodies of work across the exhibition, merging the color and minerality of Astral Sea 1 and 2 and the nets of Stella Maris(Nets). Tether(Flotsam and Jetsam) somatically places viewers in the space between land, sea, and sky.
As in much of Teresita Fernández’s practice, the sociopolitical underpinnings of Astral Sea are important yet subtle. Here, the artist’s choice of the terms flotsam (lightweight buoyant material) and jetsam (castoff heavy material) is deliberate, referencing colonial extraction and greed. These trajectories of pillage are associated with the displacement of materials both across bodies of water and at the bottom of the ocean. By presenting and then pausing this ensnarement, Teresita Fernández suspends us for a moment, making space to consider what is historically valued/hoarded and what is devalued/discarded.
Astral Sea invites viewers to reflect on their own sense of scale, place, and ambulation, prompting recognition of the buoyancy and weight of both history and the elements. As novelist Carlos Fuentes states, “The sky is neither high nor low. It’s over us and under us at the same time.”2 Teresita Fernández’s works tumble; they simultaneously float above and tether us to the ground, reminding us of the constant state of flow and flux at the place where sky, land, and sea converge on the same astral plane.
¹ From The Kaybalion, 1907
² From the novel Aura, 1962
LEHMANN MAUPIN LONDON
No.9 Cork Street, Mayfair, London
