Juju by Macarena Rojas Osterling
Many artists speak of the difficulties of combining parenthood and artistry, but through her series titled Juju (a nickname for one of her children), Macarena Rojas Osterling welcomes the experience of mothering into her artistic practice. These works combine the precision Rojas Osterling is known for, with joyously unpredictable mark making by her children themselves. We caught up with Macarena, who was speaking from her hometown of Lima, about her Juju series and what inspired these works.
What was your inspiration for this recent series? Was there a particular moment that initiated it?
It happened quite naturally, but involving my kids in my work wasn’t necessarily something that I wanted. There have been times when I’ve brought home a drawing from the studio, which has taken me months to make, and I’ve laid it out on the table, only to come back to it to find that one of the kids has drawn a huge line on it. One of my kids used to always spill things on my drawings so they would get dirty, eventually I forced myself to embrace these ‘accidents’ in the work – Now when you look in retrospect, obviously the natural thing to do was to embrace it.
These ‘interventions’ by my kids are happening less and less as they grow older. They are 10 and 6 years old now, but this whole series of drawings started when my youngest was just 3 years old. I see these drawings now almost as a ‘farewell’ stage of their young childhood – It’s another stage of motherhood and of womanhood.
Can you tell me more about the process? Do you direct the kids at all when they are drawing onto your works?
No, I just let it happen, and then I take the drawing again and work back into it. I start with a line, trying to create a composition, and then it’s completely interrupted by the text or the marks the kids make and I have to embrace the untidiness. There’s some tension because you can see there’s an attempt to make something quite controlled, and then you have this interruption.
As an adult and an artist, you obviously have a defined sense of your practice and what you seek to express through your work. What's fun about these works is that they demonstrate the fact that for a child those boundaries do not exist. They see you drawing and assume you’re playing, and they want to join in.
Yes and it happens a lot in London because my domestic space is small, so the dining room became my working space, and where the kids do homework, and where I would cook – So I thought a lot about being a woman and not having a ‘Room of One’s Own’. Now that I have a separate studio I’m curious to see what happens to the work, because I won’t have that evident interruption in the work itself.
How do you perceive this body of work in connection with your other works? Have you drawn a separation between the works that the kids can be involved with and the rest?
The Juju works are created in a domestic space, and that’s the boundary. When I’m in the studio I have complete control over the outcome of my works, and I can think in a more black and white way. It’s almost like I have to shift personalities when I’m producing works with the kids by my side. The paintings I make in my studio are the opposite to my drawings. They are my space of rest, because my drawings are very labour intensive. In the paintings, it’s almost like I’m playing the role of the child when my kids are not there with me.