Saelia Aparicio: A Joyful Parasite

Saelia Aparicio uses installation, sculpture and murals to weave together narrative, science fiction and ecological speculation.

Aparicio operates within paradoxical spaces that we often consider the normal and the everyday, using a unique symbolic system to reveal a sense of humour that destabilises our perceptions and invites us to journey into a space where other rules apply. Her multidisciplinary practice comprising mural, video, drawing and sculpture is presented through a series of whispers instead of statements, allowing audiences to enter her work through a joyous window into a playful dimension where function, affection and self-assurance coexist.

For her presentation at Baltic, Aparicio develops an ecosystem of characters and situations through a speculative universe dwelling on ideas of the organic by establishing analogies between corporeal and social mechanisms. Inspiration comes from classical mythology and the transformative forms found in Ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica – blended between animals and humans such as the sphinx, Anubis or the Mayan Camazotz. Her installation shapes a fictional world, presenting hybrid bodies, built upon semantically loaded material where what is human or not blurs. These forms are imagined through their gender fluidity, drawing from the two-spirit identity that comes from indigenous North American culture.

Commissioned by Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in partnership with Southwark Park Galleries, London and The Burton at Bideford, North Devon.