Master of Fine Art School of Fine Art
Lucia Vera Rosa
Lucia Vera Rosa (b. 2002, Liverpool) approaches her identity and culture selfishly. She uses her own body as a vessel to intuitively communicate a balance existing between the playfulness of objects. Her sculptures and film performances approach this by crafting sensations to play a role in mending an impairment, giving a greater appreciation of everyday function with a compromised body. She is interested in how her body can move in restrained conditions, when medical intervention and environment come up against self-will. She creates worlds and habitats within her sculptures where there is a possibility for her own body to enter and function on her own terms.
She explores body pain: the anger, the fluids, the ruptures and the retches as there is a story to create within each state. This work then creates her own aesthetic values and beauty on its own terms. She questions ideas of perceived ability and disability; navigating the deaf community and hearing world, finding that there is a paradox in comfort about being in the middle ground. This middle ground becomes a space for her to play on her own terms, using her body, mixing materials and questioning who she is becoming. There is space in the middle ground for her to grow into what her body needs and what emotions will fuel the way. It is all about playing her own way with what is, and what needs to become: using castings of her own body to rupture the constraint of medical devices and to question how they fit in with her flesh and bones.
It is her personal experiences of English and Hungarian heritage that explore stories of identity entwined with her family’s history. The inferred otherness of being deaf intertwines with being English/Hungarian. Through play, she looks at the emotional disturbance of what is, what was and what is becoming as a form of investigating ways of spontaneous creation, blurring those boundaries of making and accepting the ultimate fate of being deaf in a hearing world. With a restless sensitivity to both material and emotion, her practice questions what it means to function, to belong, and to evolve in spaces where language, identity, and body are constantly in flux.
Brace Yourself!
Brace Yourself! is an installation that focuses on navigating the space between the deaf community and the hearing world and carving out a space in between. This middle ground becomes a space for the artist Lucia Vera Rosa to play on her own terms, using her body to question who she is becoming. There is space in the middle ground for her to grow into what her body needs. Her emotions will fuel the way. It is all about playing her own way with what is, and what needs to become: using castings of her own body to rupture the constraint of medical devices and to question how they fit in her flesh and bones. She understands the uncomfortable and heavily vulnerable interference of inaccessibility on her body. Coming from vivid memories of hospital visits, the grey textures and sterility of the environment she frequently visited become part of her play; these objects mimic the ‘middle ground’ she is in.
This environment is a space for her to play and create, but it becomes ever so enclosed at times when she is isolated. She recreates movements of pain, grief, and restriction through the use of her own personal medical devices. These devices’ sole purpose is to help her, yet they all play a part in the pain and pressure on her body. Through her movements, she breaks free from these revisited scenes.
Through a perspective of being deaf, Lucia Vera Rosa’s work expresses the constant frustrations faced within an environment not made for her, where her desires fight to thrive in the midst of misunderstanding.
The Hungarian Orange is a Lemon
This work takes a look at Hungarian identity represented by the orange. The subject of representation of identity through an orange was started by Péter Bacsó’s film A Tanú / The witness (1969). The movie is a satirical comedy mirroring the current political situation of communism in Hungary at that time. One event that the movie captures is the real occurrence of forced labour of growing oranges where there wasn’t a suitable climate (In Hungary). In the movie this is shown by one of the main characters getting to present a communist official the one good orange they have grown in the orange research institute. During the ceremony titled “Elore a Magyar naracsért” (translated to “Forwards with the Hungarian Orange”), before they try to present the orange, one character’s little boy eats it, leaving a panic on what to present to the official. They come up with a plan to present a lemon instead, insisting that no one will know. When the official tries the orange (that is actually a lemon) he instantly puckers up to the sourness of the supposed orange and questions if it is really an orange. To this response, a character proclaims that this is “The new Hungarian Orange, it’s a tad bit more yellow, a bit sour, but its OURS”. This scene became influential due to “the “Hungarian orange” became a symbol for expressing the gap between the sweet party propaganda and the daily sour reality of socialist life.” The then “liberal” political party Fidesz adopted the symbolism of the orange in their campaigns into progressing out of communist times. The Hungarian orange represents who we are as a nation and how we have fought for what we believe in, the ideals of building a better state than what was. The Hungarian orange has metaphorically constantly rolled back and forwards in its political views and ways of life. Looking around the exhibition space you will find the orange placed everywhere, representing that we aren’t repressed and restricted anymore, we are free to be Hungarian in own terms. This piece is made in memory of my Hungarian grandparents, for their stories and treasures from their time has abetted me into exploring my own identity in being Hungarian.
