Bursting into an artist’s shop or studio, without prior notice, may be an unfortunate act. Without meaning it, you can kill an idea before it hatches, scare away a gesture that could have been the beginning of a promising path, the happy ending of the chasing after an image, a word, finding the thread that leads you to that place you have got just a glimpse of for so many nights.
One afternoon, knowing the risk, I wanted to get to know the plastic artist Martha Jimenez at the very site where she creates, after enjoying the creatures (The Gossip, the water seller, the newspaper reader, the pair of lovers) neighbors or passer-by, who seduced her sight and her hands and remained forever in the Plaza del Carmen in the city of Camagüey, where the artist lives, creates, teaches.
But Martha is a smart woman. Before one can access her premises one must go through several rooms where she exhibits her work. And there you get stranded, among her creations, unraveling the symbols she uses to tell us of identity, nation, women and their daily battles, small and momentous, all at once.
There you find canvases that correspond to the various series that she has prepared, including "Longings" or "Women that Fly", where fat women, thick, with wide hips, and dreaming with her feet on the ground, are the beginning and end of her expressive speech. While other objects appear, key points of her reflections, as sewing machines, boats and oars, which speak of searches, the roads we choose to be, the barely glimpsed destiny that awaits us.
In the exhibition halls her glazed ceramic creations also live, returning on the same issues and others related to the place of women, from the one that looks and creates, with the nation, with other texts such as poems by José Martí.
And near the end of the house, you find Martha, among a tangle of tubes of paint, canvas, cardboard, books. It is also the chair where she probably sits to think, to look from a distance a birth, to rest from the rigors imposed by creation.
The study opens to the courtyard of colonial design, where the slightest complex live a tinajón (a large earthenware jar), the old symbol of a city, and one of the women is holding a cage where another woman is locked up, as if to say that seclusion does not always come from others, from their demands and beliefs. But Martha will not answer the question for us: instead she will let us seek the answer by ourselves.
