EVA FÀBREGAS

When women visit Eva Fàbregas’s studio, it often happens that they’ll begin to tell her about their experiences with childbirth. The artist is by now used to hearing about her audience’s bodily affections. At her latest opening in Barcelona, a man described to her a recent inflammation of his, and once, in Munich, a woman had to leave the show because Eva’s soft, pulsating worms recalled a past stomach tumor.

Something about Eva’s lumpy, limber sculptures snakes its way into viewers’ bodies and strikes a chord from within. It’s a sensation, an experience of the world beyond the verbal, that the 37-year-old has pursued throughout her career. In Eva’s words, “there is something about getting out of our head so we can begin thinking with our hands, about stepping out of the eye so we can start seeing with the stomach, about leaving the ear so we can begin listening with our guts…”

Eva’s sunny Barcelona studio is currently beset with crusty, flesh-colored orbs that hang swollen and twisted in all sizes. She calls them “exudates.” “Exudation is a body’s natural response when suffering an injury or inflammation, like the organic fluids that seep from our blood vessels in the healing process or the viscous substances that bleed from trees to protect, seal, and regenerate their wounds,” she explains, adding: “This is a metabolic process that we share with other life forms, not something that’s only human. These sculptures are, in fact, made with latex, and latex is itself an exudation from a tree.”

Eva forms each wrinkly membrane by melding the latex with an elastic mesh. As the two gradually solidify, she begins to apply and remove air. “I make them exhale, inhale, and exhale. And with that breathing, the first stretch marks start to appear.” The process, deeply biotic, fills each balloon with an air of vitality. “It’s their first breath together,” says Eva.

Like many of Eva’s techniques, this one came from a fortuitous accident while experimenting in her studio. Experimenting with materials is integral to Eva’s practice. If she were a painter, she explains, her studio would be where she mixes her paints, and the exhibition space would be her canvas; meaning, Eva won’t truly begin to paint until the time of installation. Once there, she’ll mold her sculpture’s nodes and knobs to the building, conversing with the architecture, patching its wounds and hanging spores that ooze from its cracks. But back in the studio, her focus is entirely on building blocks, trial and error.

“By not having a formal education in sculpture, I feel a lot of freedom when it comes to my relationship to materials,” says Eva. When testing a new product, she’ll read the instructions but then fall into a state of unlearning as she allows the material to unfold. “Materials have their particularities, and they guide you in their path. A material is not like a blank canvas. A material has its limits.” To Eva, sculpture is not about imposing a new shape onto a body of matter; it’s a collaboration, which is why she gravitates to the soft and elastic: “A soft material is sensitive to its environment and is always in constant conversation.”

As a child, Eva sang in a professional choir. She remembers a strange feeling at the end of a concert, when the audience’s applause would bring her a sense of awakening, a return into focus, as if the hours of singing had held her in a trance. It’s this state of flow, what she calls a “preverbal state,” that Eva chases in her practice. “There is a very intuitive and very visceral component which channels my lived experiences and emotions,” she says. In the process, her sculptures have evolved past the recognizable—no longer intestines or placentas, corals or worms or any one thing. They are the mutation and multiplication of her fears and desires, morphed into a “speculative landscape” where viewers find their own inner world.

As for Eva, it’s no surprise that the membrane between her and the world is a permeable one that begins with her body—Eva loves to dance—and seeps into her art. One night, at a club in London, she became curiously aware of how the vibrations pumping from the subwoofers and coursing through the building, through the air, and through her body made them all pulse as one. She translated that experience into her installation Pumping (2019), attaching subwoofers to inflated sculptures that thumped with an electronic sound.

True to the shapeshifting world of her making, Eva tries to keep conversations about her art fluid: “It’s like my sculptures. It’s a discourse that’s also soft and slippery and is full of layers, full of crevices, full of fragments.” That is especially true now, between exhibitions, when she’s submerged in experimentation—she’s now testing how far her exudates will dilate and swell. We leave her at work mixing paints: following materials as they speak to her organs and listening for what note they may play.