How I start with ceramics
Text by Carlos Risco
I met Nuria at a mutual artist friend’s studio. It’s been quite some time. In fact, more years than there are fingers to count them. She had just moved into her studio in El Rastro, Madrid, and was beginning to leave behind that double life of flight attendant and painter of metropolitan beauty always breaking the rules. She told me everything with no rush, eating nuts in Casino de la Reina Park, among drug addicts and street sellers, in the Lavapiés neighbourhood. It was then that she gifted me with a sentence typical of her, one that since then, I apply to all things in my life as it hides an existential truth: “It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
Nuria was one of the few people who understood my Vespa trips around the city, and didn’t look with pity at that old 75cc PK from the Eighties, spray painted, with a Girona number plate. It was easy to tell her of the happiness that began accelerating and the breeze tickling the face and smile through glasses and helmet as you drove away. And this is why, when I told her I would leave for a couple of weeks in the Alcarria on my Vespa, with a sleeping bag and a camping stove inside the yellow tweed suitcase bought at an antique shop, she smiled (like she always does). No need to tell her that traveling on Vespa was about passing, surpassing oneself, and myself, and that shifting gears and accelerating slowly, the finish line was nothing other than lightheartedness. She knew.
Truth is that, unlike most people, you don’t have to explain yourself to be understood by Nuria. She reads you from afar, you and everyone else. She is more alive than the living, and when you are with her, your heart beats faster and your thoughts are clearer. She is one of the very few artists I know who doesn’t remind you that she is «Artist» and who doesn’t have her own work hung in her home. I asked her about it the first time she invited me over to her attic in Lavapiés, two streets down from my resilient journalist small flat. “I don’t want anything of mine in here,” she said, “my ego doesn’t need that, and I don’t like to see the dead.” I recognised things I won’t forget: an illustrated edition of Macbeth from the Twenties and plenty of ceramic isolators in a special altar in her bookcase. Even then, she was obsessed with those small round objects, perfect in themselves, magnetically engineered for their purpose, that she would take from house facades when she approached with the crane to paint her murals. “Look, the design is simple yet perfect, an isolator can hold a cable away from the pole so it won’t catch fire because of a spark. In this preciousness, there’s a huge complexity.” Nuria was already imagining something with those objects and so she went on to build her first buoys in which she mixed her palette of acid spray colours and vandalistic beauties with a vital urgency: redemption.
Nuria was hit by a tsunami that overwhelmed her whole family. The Moras, an eccentric genius clan, fell into the mud. To save her family, Nuria, the firstborn, first of all had to redeem herself. From there, the symbolism of the buoy as life-saving for the castaways, as breathing space limit and emotional frontier in the face of life when clouded by the thick fog of turmoil. Nuria might have caught my runaway smile and thought to escape
herself while she could: one day she appeared in the Rastro square with a red Vespa PX that became a magical ship for her to throw herself into excursions and celebrate this business of feeling alive. With her being an action woman, it took her little to convert that scooter into a “puppy” on holiday, that would carry her through everyday asperities. While I was reading the adventure of Giorgio Bertinelli in Italian, Nuria was accompanying me to all the secret little shops in Madrid to buy the essential material to escape: with four cables, we set up a USB plug to charge our phones during the journey, she made beautiful gloves with wool and leather that I still treasure (the closing is a Smile that reminds you everything will be alright before you clasp the handle). We put together fir panels to create a suitcase for her that she covered with her favourite canvas: a painting by Burgos exclusively sold at a bazaar in that long gone Madrid we only catch a glimpse of, like a star that died a million years ago. Not yet satisfied, she waterproofed it with a secret rubber, and applied leather corner guards like those of my tweed suitcase. There wasn’t a Vespa more beautiful on Madrid secondary roads, or in Spain, since Nuria, who doesn’t know limits, started to drive on hers across all corners of the peninsula. First she reached Porto, then through Portugal to Alentejo, only to reappear in Madrid with that small cylinder under her seat. Nuria was her own passenger, celebrating life with the four gears of that insignificant machine taking her away from everything, bringing her closer to herself.
With her photographer friend Enrique Escandell, whose book, Subterraneos, navigates the secret mission of Madrilenian underground graffiti artists like no other, Nuria collected ceramic insulators from the streets between the capital and Valencia. They came back with that suitcase full of them, uprooted from the facades and scattered on the grounds of those beautiful places that belonged to the previous industry, abandoned to their destiny by the new energy lobby of the country, more focused now on filling the mountains with horrific and inefficient wind farms in order to wash consciences and break the mountains silence. But those spoils weren’t enough for Nuria, so she went back to those places full of insulators for more. She had an idea for her buoys and needed to gather all the necessary material that couldn’t be found elsewhere, parked as it was in a limbo between two civilisations in a world that was changing.
The following year, I was the editor of a magazine in Ibiza, and Nuria was on her Vespa, headed for an artist’s residence in the Balearic Islands. An irrepressible force. I have never seen a scooter like her red Vespa, always obedient and resistant to falls and destiny’s difficulties. Juan used to fix it; he was a slightly overweight mechanic who understood our dreams and remembered his youth’s adventures from his repair shop in Vistillas.
Visiting her studio, I saw the buoys Nurias was working on for an exhibition in France. Then I saw her live in the Galleria Astarté in Montesquinza. The buoys, she says, “are reminiscent of a debacle, like the poetic image of an object to hold on to, a redemptive element, one that marks an area of the sea.” Within them, her antidote against the difficulties of life, frequent relocations, a solid future that dissolved like a sugar cube. The Vespa was the counterweight that led to detachment: traveling on earth, slowly and with
a tent on her back to leave behind years of work in aviation, between airports and hotels, without stopping anywhere. The scooter meant “moving and doing things in a different way.” A small two-strokes engine, combined with a synchronised sound, mixing fuel and oil to support the greatest of journeys, the one that happens within one’s self, allowing one to leave with sufficient slowness, giving one the time to evaluate every desire and yearning, and to relocate oneself in the world and come back from obscurity with new luminous projects.
I believe I don’t exaggerate when I say to Nuria that no one is more persistent than me when it comes to her ceramics. The door that her buoys opened was so heavy that it could not have been just another stop along the journey: it was a place that demanded pause and exploration with all senses. An air so fruitful lungs must breathe it all in. So when she finished working on the ceramic pieces she had recovered during the trips on her Vespa, Nuria went back to the do it yourself attitude of the time she started off in the Nineties. She didn’t let not having pursued sculpture during her Academy of Fine Arts years hold her back: she locked herself in her studio (sometimes I do believe she lives in there) and started producing two-piece moulds like crazy. She did ask a ceramist friend, but no one seemed to give her the answers she sought with her questions. She experimented with cement, but with poor results. Little by little, she had to accept that she couldn’t do it on her own, she needed a professional to achieve what she had in mind. That’s when someone suggested she should trust a mould expert. Nuria, with her energy, charmed a pensioner with little enthusiasm out of his sitting room comfort, and offered him the opportunity to create all sorts of plaster and cement moulds. At the same time, she hijacked every kind of object: flower pots, soap bottles, ceramic insulators. Not only would she replicate them, but she would alter their shape and proportions. The studio then began to fill with slip cubes and plaster moulds, like an endless factory with toroids and all, and the columns Nuria created would turn a fifteen centimetres piece of polystyrene salvaged from waste into a superlative object.
The red Vespa, always parked outside the studio, was the transport-ambulance for all those creatures to the local ceramists’ kilns who she charmed to let her cook her pieces. “I carried crockery on that scooter like it was an Easter procession,” she jokes. The ceramists opened their doors with curiosity and indifference. First, they looked at her with skepticism for the upstart, then with envy of toothless lions, and finally (but not all of them) with admiration for being in the presence of someone remarkable.
I like to ask Nuria about this time in her life, it was like an uncontrollable fever. She remembers it like this. It was irrepressible: a new playing field opened ahead and she could create every shape her mind designed. No technical limitation, and with her free approach, no rules or standards either. Nuria wanted to replicate the organic shape of sea sponges and turn them into ceramic. “Can it be done?” she asked the expert. The man replied with a laconic, “No,” but Nuria was unstoppable, and burned dozens of sponges, broke kilograms of ceramic until the idea that hammered in her head took shape in the kiln. Working with an expert was a massive help: “He helped me minimize errors so that I could proceed with all my crazy ideas. With no knowledge of the rules, I could think freely.” Again, the outsider that sneaks in and achieves the unimaginable
because no one has told her that it can’t be done. When Nuria eventually installed a kiln in her studio, she had already mastered the technique, and she turned it into a sort of contemporary ceramic workshop. We were all flabbergasted by the new palette of colours and ceramic designs. Because no one paints ceramic like Nuria Mora. Ceramists create their own glaze, she uses standard colours and paper tape and recreates the style of street paint to reach new solutions. Her nurimoresc palette, her acid tones, found new life in something different, primary, touching the invisible limits of artistic expression, one hand in Greece, the other in Altamira. Now, she has managed to reproduce her obsession and fetish shapes in a new superlative dimension. Perspectives grow enriched with vitamins, and her new totems recall an unknown presence. Their maker (she hates being called an artist) is the first one to be surprised. I tease her on the phone, “So Nuria, what now?” and her, smoothing clay, answers, “I’ll carry on with this until my next obsession”.