Lucía Bayón Mendoza

Water jet, Calendar roll, Press centres its initial research on the growing industrial fabric of the city of Madrid, specifically on the Royal Tapestry Factory that was built in San Fernando in the 18th century, and on a paper mill that was attached to the manufacture of textiles whose original location is unknown today. 

Taking the narrative of the mill that once stood in that now unknown location as the starting point of a fiction, this work proposes a fictionalised re-elucubration of that apparatus, making use of sources that date the history of the place and the formal archetypes of the mechanics of the parts of the press and the calendar roll, from which to generate a sculptural grammar, using waste from the production of paper and cloth. 

What happens when materials are allowed to speak through their changing conditions and as they are handled? How can you verbally and objectively translate these processes, their duration and their working legacies? A machine is an extension, an amplification of the capabilities of the body. Is there a way to express the stubbornness of the material being handled in its refusal to become something of economic value, an established and stable product?

The press and the calendar roll are machines that form part of the textile production process whose role is to transform open fabric into something altogether more compact. The hydraulic wheel driven by a current of water, and the set of mallets and cylinders activated by that wheel, through which the fabric passes, vary the degree of pressure exerted on that same fabric. Lucía’s interest in the language and verbs - fields of action - that are associated with sculpture leads her to explore the idea of generating parts that are governed by the mechanics of these machines: soaking, pressing, wringing, tightening and smoothing, compacting. 

BIO

Lucia Bayon Mendoza (Madrid, 1994) lives and works in Madrid. Her practice revolves around sculpture and installations. She conceives the different elements of her work - language and objects - as rhetorical devices within a semantic field where the friction between function and form generated through the seriality and accumulation of gestures, rhythms and materials is visualised.

She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and from the Universität der Künste in Berlin and she also took a master’s degree in Fine Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. She has received the Botín Foundation Plastic Arts Scholarship (Santander, 2019), and won awards in the Generations (Montemadrid Foundation, 2020) and Plastic Arts Circuits (Madrid, 2020) competitions. Her future exhibitions most notably include her first individual exhibition at Interstice (Madrid, 2022) and the Itineraries exhibition at the Botín Centre (Santander, 2022).