Naiadelcastillo

The construction and articulation of femininity is the principle theme of Naia del Castillo’s work. In a changing Spain that has evolved from a traditional society with strict ideas about the role of women in society and the home to a modern state with progressive laws and a cabinet consisting of more women than men, including a pregnant defense minister, the subject is both timely and interesting in its many manifestations.
Trained as a sculptor, del Castillo photographs her constructions with an explicit emphasis on their symbolic value. “I use sculpture,” she writes, “to create new realities but alter the codes we recognize.” Thus she explores and exploits traditional female symbols, images, or topics to her own ends in ways that “do not intend to present a feminist vision through [her] works without showing that [she] is a woman and that her point of view begins with this standpoint.” Hers is a personal vision rather than an all-encompassing manifesto. As she puts it, “To be human is the principal nexus of everything” she does.
Del Castillo’s titles emphasize her interest in the contingency of women. Atrapados (Trapped), Retratos y Diálogos (Portraits and Dialogues), Sin Titulo―Horas de Oficina (Untitled―Office Hours), Sobre la Seducción (On Seduction), Ofrendas y Posesiones (Offerings and Possessions), Las dos Hermanas (The Two Sisters), and the more recent Todo parece ilimitado (Everything Seems Unlimited) testify to her range of explorations.
The jewelry and dresses she creates for her pieces have symbolic value not merely as objects in themselves but in how she alters their basic functions to suit her ends. Domestic Space Chair (2000) for example from Trapados is represented by a dress—more of a wrap-around skirt—that is enigmatically attached to a chair. The fabric of the cushion is the same as that of the skirt. Wearing that dress, the woman is automatically seen to be bound by the ties of the home and hearth and all but condemned to domesticity. Seen without her face, she is “Everywoman.” In Domestic Space Bed (2001) a woman, again all but faceless, is literally sewn into the white bedclothes covering a bed. In Sin Titulo―Horas de Oficina (2000) a woman’s head covering is part of a man’s suit jacket. Their pose, echoing a famous August Sander image, relates to the traditional dependency of women as in the phrase, “Behind every successful man is a woman.”
The traditional tools of seduction, cosmetics, jewelry, and fashion feature prominently in her work. In El árbol del joyero (The Tree of the Jeweler, 2006), a set of buttons on a sumptuous deep-red dress contain photographic images of a woman’s hand offering an eroticized flower, a magpie, known for being attracted to shiny objects, obscuring the naked torso of a woman, its open beak poised over a nipple, the hand of a woman suggestively playing with a cut papaya, and an image where a woman unveils herself as one of her hands meets that of a man by her right nipple and the other disappears below her waist as reflected in a mirror. Complete seduction. In the actual image, a torso shot again without face, the woman’s left hand holds a “small tree” made of many rings fused together near the button with the image of the magpie.
In Las dos Hermanas (2005), two women share a sumptuous blue dress of raw silk, their hair intertwined. The dress, an impractical confection, is rendered more impractical by the small pillows sewn into its skirts. The dress itself is seen as a sculptural object in another image, an installation view, and kept upright by what appear to be iron skewers from a kitchen.
In almost all of her creations del Castillo works with the circular game of seduction. It is a Möbius strip of giving and receiving. One side cannot exist without the other. Like Spain, she has evolved from representing women as stuck in traditional roles to a position where they are equal players in the human dance that is contemporary society.