Maria Ezcurra

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Artist Statement


 My work questions and reconfigures the physical, emotional, and cultural boundaries of the body as a territory shaped by norms, affects, and expectations of gender, particularly in relation to migration, belonging, and systems of exclusion and oppression. The body often appears in my work through its absence rather than through direct representation, suggesting lived experiences through surfaces, traces, material tensions, and repeated gestures. By weaving personal narratives with broader social, ecological, and geopolitical contexts, my works make visible complex and shifting processes through which identities are constructed, negotiated, and transformed over time.

I work primarily with recovered and reused materials such as textiles, particularly clothing, cardboard, suitcases, and domestic objects, which I understand as carriers of individual and collective memories marked by use, wear, and circulation. These materials function as sensitive archives of affect, labor, and lived experience, activated through gestures such as cutting, sewing, assembling, and drawing. 

Migration, both human and nonhuman, occupies a central place in my practice. Through migratory birds, butterflies, objects, and garments, I explore movements across territories and the contradictions they reveal between freedom and vulnerability, rootedness and loss, intimate memory and planetary crisis. 

My practice frequently extends beyond the studio into public and community based contexts. Participation, collaboration, and collective making are not merely working methods, but ethical positions that run through my creative process. By bringing together recycled materials, ephemeral gestures, and collective processes, I seek to generate spaces that are both poetic and political, responding to urgent ecological and social issues while opening sites for dialogue, care, imagination, and transformation.