Jenny Ayala

The indivisibility of spatial and self-perception, and the resulting question regarding the existential nature of space, permeates Jenny Ayala’s major body of work. She is particularly interested in ‘wounded space’ and the themes of pain, trauma and healing within the tension between the individual and the collective. For Ayala, the physicality and reality of pain, as well as the spatial localisation of vulnerability, lie at the heart of her work. For her, every space possesses a memory of pain, an aesthetic fracture, a wound and a secret, which are revealed in the act of exhibiting, seeing and remembering.

The artist’s site-specific, space-permeating installations and assemblages are characterised by distinctive eggshells and a strictly geometrically structured composition. Beyond the iconographic or symbolic significance of the egg, for instance as a symbol of life and fertility, the eggshell in Ayala’s work functions not only as a narrative but becomes a new ‘painterly’ medium, analogous to the dots of colour in a pointillist painting.

In her installations, Jenny Ayala analyses the essence of a specific space in all its facets and explores the potential of the space as well as its physical possibilities and limitations. In doing so, she relentlessly dissects existing spatial structures in order to challenge spatial boundaries and prescribed ranges of movement, and in turn to counter these with new structures and spaces for movement. What unfolds is an ambivalent interplay of fundamental, ontologically shaped experiences of space, which interpenetrate one another whilst bringing to the fore the connection to one’s own self.