SPOTTED: Metropolis M explores how Vanessa Vallejo Cunillera visualizes growth
- Design
Every year, the magazine Metropolis M releases a Graduation Special, featuring work from various alumni who graduated as visual artists. Vanessa Vallejo Cunillera graduated from Crossmedia Design in Enschede and is one of the alumni featured in the special. Metropolis M asked Vanessa: "What is the story behind your work?”
‘My work is about connections between the creative process and the process of metamorphosis. It originated during my research about the life cycle of butterflies’, explains Vanessa Vallejo Cunillera. In her graduation project Metamorphosis, she displays a series of small prints in the stairwell of the academy, an in-between space in which you move past the work as you ascend. ‘It is an experiment about rawness, honesty and consists of many facets; just like the results of my process of becoming a publisher’, she adds.
For Metamorphosis, Vallejo Cunillera worked a lot with lino prints. This involves creating and reproducing images by destroying the material. ‘I experimented by continually changing things, cutting and using what was left over. My inspiration was the creativity that is inherent in metamorphosis. For instance, caterpillars digest not only food but also themselves in order to enable the creation of the butterfly. My own process was also about letting go of control and allowing things. By approaching this process in an anthropomorphic way, I learned a lot. For example, as an international student, I have personally experienced big contrasts in this totally different geographical and cultural setting. As a result, I have developed the capacity to adapt and be resilient.’
She finds the metaphor of metamorphosis hopeful: the ability to make changes internally and grow wings if you need to. ‘There was something reassuring about devising ever new ways of creating starting from a non-human context. The most important insight I had is that there will always be moments of change, of growing bigger and growing smaller again. Of digesting yourself and casting off your skin. Of emerging and spreading your wings. I hope my work shows that within a single context, there can be room for all kinds of realities. We are all in a different growth phase, each with our own rhythm and it is important to show that. I hope that we will come to view the idea of growth differently and see that it is non-linear. Growth is not a one-off thing but something we continue to do.’
Author: Gerda van de Glind, writer and curator