Exhibition: 16 May – 14 June 2025
RSVP Opening event: Saturday 17 May, 5 – 7pm
RSVP Gallery Walk-Through: Saturday 24 May, 2 – 4pm
AMES NEWS Article | Pamela See
The Shadow That Follows Me, features a new body of work by Paula Quintela that extends upon her existing practice. Drawing from her early childhood memories in Chile, a country ruled at the time by dictatorship, she vividly recalls long and difficult years of hardship that have vehemently shaped her artistic practice today. Paula’s new works beautifully transform her reflections on her childhood and desire to express her experience of diaspora into a world of fantasy, imagination, exploration, and wonder. The Shadow That Follows Me comprises an enthralling series of mixed-media works on paper, together with several new sculptures that draw upon her 2-dimensional motifs, bringing these unique characters to life.
Essay Writer Cassandra Lehman states, “Inspired by a recent trip back to Chile and Quintela’s father’s death, a novel perspective of heredity, culture, and memory is seen through the eyes of a perpetual outsider. Paula Quintela’s life story reads like a novel, soaked in magic realism. Surrounded by her large, lovingly eccentric family, she witnessed the disappearance of family friends and the fear and uncertainty that came with political upheaval. Quintela’s vivid and haunting memories as a young child during the coup d’état in Chile in 1973 and the oppressive atmosphere under Pinochet’s regime are ever present in her art. These experiences have profoundly shaped her artistic narrative with themes of survival and resilience, blurring the boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds. Her imagined forests are populated with hybridised, shadow-dwelling creatures and anthropomorphic flora, and are scattered with forensic traces of the indigenous ancestors. Employing a multiplicity of techniques, Quintela’s Chine collé and hand-coloured etchings are unique. Her painted ceramic specimens reveal a vulnerability in being visible, reflecting on her personal experience of a life spent hiding in plain sight.”
Image: Courtesy of the artist and Onespace.
