Oil and Acrylic on Linen

910 x 727 mm

Alfonsino y el mar

The Japanese cormorant has been trained to fish alongside people for centuries. A ring around its neck allows it to catch fish but prevents it from swallowing the largest ones. It labours, but the reward belongs elsewhere.

The relationship between the cormorant and its keeper is one of trust, dependence, and exploitation all at once. What does it mean to devote yourself to a practice that constantly asks for more?

The name alfonsino immediately reminded me of the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni, who walked into the Atlantic Ocean at Mar del Plata in 1938. Her death has often overshadowed her remarkable body of work, reducing a lifetime of writing to a single tragic image. That uneasy relationship between artistic production, public expectation, and personal sacrifice found its way into this painting.

A wilted iris collapses between bird and fish, marking the end of a flowering season. Wrapped in plastic and finished with a small “Paid, thank you” sticker, the fish becomes another reminder that beauty, labour, and even grief can be packaged, priced, and exchanged.

This is the most personal painting in the exhibition. It grew from a question I kept returning to during this residency: what does the art world ask of the people who sustain it? We are encouraged to give more of ourselves, more work, more vulnerability, more stories, always hoping the next exhibition, residency, or opportunity will finally be enough. Like the cormorant, artists are expected to keep diving. The painting does not offer an answer. It simply asks whether, somewhere along the way, we mistake endless extraction for devotion.