Sara Iraburu
she/her
María: Life Before the Fire
This project springs from absence: a woman who exists only in the form of fire.
María appears only once in history, in the record of her trial, condemned as a witch and burned at the stake. There is no voice — only the words of the men who decided her fate. She survives as a name written on paper, a life reduced to that version of herself.
Four hundred and fifty years later, I attempt to remember her by imagining what cannot be known. How do you remember someone who has been forgotten? How do you give voice to a life that was never allowed to speak? I think about charcoal: the residue of pain that still leaves its mark, that stains, that insists.
By working with charcoal, absence becomes a place to inhabit. Not to fill the silence, but to sit beside it and allow it to speak in its own way.
Dear María, charcoal on tracing paper, 21 x 29.7 cm.
Still from Life before the Fire.
Close-up detail Dear María, charcoal on tracing paper, 21 x 29.7 cm.
Close-up detail Dear María, charcoal on tracing paper, 21 x 29.7 cm.
When she was Young, white charcoal on photograph, 21 x 15.7 cm.
Detail view research book, ink on tracing paper, 21 x 29.7 cm.
Still from Life before the Fire.
Close-up detail Dear María, charcoal on tracing paper, 21 x 29.7 cm.
Life before the Fire, poster, mixed-media, 42 x 59.4 cm.
Research
Sketchbook pages.
Taconera Park, Pamplona, Spain. Digital photograph.
Natural charcoal as drawing tools.
Research sketchbook.
Anotzibar, Navarra, Spain. Digital photograph.