Memories

One of the last times I saw my sister-in-law Elena, she was sitting in her dining room with sticky paper tape in her hands. She had turned her dining table into a workbench and on the protective sheet she had scattered an assortment of rolls: from toilet rolls and paper towels rolls to stiffer cardboard tubes like those used in fax machines or for aluminium foil, and there were piles of small, empty cardboard packages of various shapes. Her hands were combining and gluing these objects with the help of paper tape; she would caress them, softening their shapes, transforming them until they became abstract sculptures, objets d’art.

‘I’ve found a way to use all this stuff,’ she told me happily without ever interrupting her work.

There was an urgency in what she was doing. Elena had never stopped creating, first as an architect and then as a painter and sculptor. Now, when she could no longer work with small, precise details as in her mobile wood sculptures and collages, she had found a technique that allowed her to continue creating.

Those objects, disposable items that one would normally throw away, were transformed by Elena into abstract, austere, tender and unexpected sculptures with plays of light and shadow that in some of the objects were emphasised by gilding.

As a person, Elena was very rational and reserved, but her playful personality came through in her art. Creating was for her a matter of urgency, an expression of life where her affectionate, humorous and playful side came out. To understand Elena, I think you had to watch her as she created her sculptures: her hands working uninterruptedly with paper tape and cardboard rolls and her expression of urgency, joy and concentration, that was Elena for me. That is how I remember her: beautiful in her love for what she was creating.

Barbro Guaccero