Aitor Gonzalez is a Spanish artist who has recently moved his studio to Shoreditch, London. His sculptures are assemblages of different materials that he chances upon on his way to the studio. Aitor weaves diasporic experiences, hair, silicone, and iPhone texts to inform his practice which has identity and culture at its target. At a time when we are realizing how much matter actually matters, Aitor's work shows us how the empirical experience of artwork can challenge our common understanding of things. We spoke to Aitor about his creative process and the stories that permeate his projects.

Your work often utilizes different sorts of materia — sometimes even organic and inorganic — I’m thinking of your work ‘Regalo para Mamá’ where you use hair and silicone to build your piece. Where does your interest in this interplay come from?

Most of my work is quite improvised and comes from materials I find on my way to the studio.

Hair is a very cool one. It was available in bulk some time ago from a wig shop near my studio in Dalston. In ‘Regalo para Mamá’ (Present for mum) I like how it plays with the silicone. It’s almost as if these materials were not meant to be together but they decided to weave into each other anyways.

Hair is something that changes, it can be cut, dyed, grown, styled. It also has different cultural meanings and it’s fairly resistant. In the body, it is one of the last parts to decompose and stays long after the flesh is gone.

Traditionally it talks also about ethnic ancestry. When my mum first moved to Spain in the mid 80’s she cut her long braid and bleached her hair to look like Madonna on True Blue. As I was growing up she used to change her hair often, I think for her this was her way of digesting “Western Modernity”.

Finding the hair shop near the studio was an opportunity to bring back that story.

Your work also has an element of the poetic. A piece composed of neoprene and a wire basket entitled ‘My heart is melting’, almost conjures a Dickinsonian feeling. Can you tell us more about this piece and speak about the textual element in your work?

‘My heart is melting’ was part of an exhibition back in 2017 at Set The Controls for The Heart Of The Sun, a gallery space in Leeds. The Exhibition was called ‘Siempre es un buen momento’ (Always a good time) and it moved around ideas of romantization, and perception. It was almost placed on a holiday scene, the walls were partly painted on a bright blue called “Tropical Scape”, the description of the colour said something like ‘This beautiful and bright blue is ideal for creating an exotic haven - friendly and optimistic, but never cold.’

I used this description as a starting point for the show and most of the work was more or less a response to this idea of “Paradise”. The gallery was full of different objects such as canvases painted on that blue, foam structures coated on concrete that emulated ruins, tanned wood etc.

‘My heart is melting’ was part of this exhibition. It consisted of a Huaco (a Peruvian anthropomorphic ceramic normally found in burial sites and displayed often in museums all over Peru) printed on neoprene and folded on a metal basket.

I think text is a very important part of my work. I like reading and I like writing. I am very interested in the politics of language, I believe that culture can be told through myths, and that literature and speech have a big role when it comes to shaping systems of belief.

Even though your work medium is typically mixed, sometimes you resort to using crayons on canvas. Do you have a specific preferred medium and why?

I would consider my practice as sculptural. I had a hiatus in my practice for a while after school where I was not sure what I was doing. Ultimately I don’t feel very limited to any medium but if I had to respond to –What do you do? I would probably say – Sculpture, I like how flexible it is.

I also make some work that includes text on canvas. In 2018 I got into the routine of saving notes that were generated only using the predictive text on my phone. I used these notes to create a series of canvases and the result was always super enigmatic. These notes were texts generated by my phone from words and phrases that I most use in my every day, it was almost as if my psyche could be transformed into written text.

In your work, you reimagine the identity of things and how these could be potentially overwritten. One of your works is a black architectural structure with twisted yellow candles serpentining around the metal rods. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

'Regalo para mamá' (Present for mum) is a series of sculptures that I’ve been doing around familiar myths. They are quite hermetic, like short stories.

They are also kind of cathartic in the most religious way of the word.

I went to Catholic schools until I was seventeen. I think Catholic culture has an incredibly vast bank of stories. I grew up fascinated with these stories but other than that it was quite limiting. Most of the things that I saw as the norm were things that conflicted with myself, my sexuality, or my way of understanding my surroundings.

On the other side I grew up in a bicultural home, my dad’s family were part of a rural exodus that took place in Spain during the Franquism and my mum comes from a small village in Peru, so I guess my house was a constant flux of family traditions, myths etc. It was not until later that I realized that these stories could be a useful resource for my practice.

Can you walk us through your process when it comes to creating these sculptures?

I wake up in the morning, I walk to my studio, I collect things and then I put them together to make other things.

Most of my work comes from experimenting, and sometimes it can be quite dirty and chaotic. In all honesty for me making work is something personal, therapeutic, and very relaxing, I enjoy thinking how queering it is to mix things that are not meant to be together, confuse things and present them so they are a bit more challenging to understand.

I think of visual art as almost a poetic exercise. Some of my artistic training was very academic and there was a shaming on doing things ‘wrong’. For me, the process of making is about failing and trying.

Given that you're very interested in different textures, materials, and media, that you're not always perhaps intentionally looking for, it seems plausible to say that the process of your artwork is as interesting and important as the outcome. For me, the idea of 'process' is significant in so far as it connotes how one thing attaches to the other, or how one stage informs the next. How do you reflect on this?

I agree. The work can be fragmented at times but so are the mental states and the familial experiences. I think the process is very important in my practice, I like the idea of using my immediate surroundings as a prior state in my production. I think the materials and objects that are available to me can have a great ability to hold personal experiences and storylines.

In a way, the work can be seen as revisionist, it doesn’t focus on the “proper” use of things but how these objects and materials can stretch and expand to accommodate different narrative threads.

A bit following this research, me and some colleagues started a project called Club, a few years ago in 2017. We were interested in developing community projects mainly around artistic processes. Most of the work we did was not aimed at trained artists and the result was super enriching for us and I hope for the communities we worked with. Part of our interest in the collective was to also provide affordable studio spaces to emerging artists in West Yorkshire.

What are you working on right now?

I am currently really interested in working in collaboration with other artists, I am developing a book with a friend writer (my former housemate) around stories in Dalston. It is very much a draft still.

And I am working in my new studio in Shoreditch.