Tamara Burlando
Since I was little I found pleasure in making things, creating things that hitherto only lived in my imagination. As a child I had a strong connection with nature, especially plants. I think that's where my love for natural materials comes from.
Normally an image will come to me and stay staged somewhere in my mind. I can see it clearly, and then I feel the urge of materializing what I see.
Other times I just start playing with materials, with no clear clue where I'm heading off. I spend many hours, days or months knitting, weaving, crocheting, stitching, dyeing, painting, designing, and exploring combinations of materials, without knowing what the final results will look like. Then, somehow in the middle of that process, everything starts to make sense. The dots start to connect, and suddenly a new body of work is being born.
Art is my way of processing life, feelings, emotions, trauma. It's my therapy. It gives me peace, it grounds me and make me happy. It's where I can connect with my deeper-self most easily.
The studio is where I flow, is where I feel at home. I love being surrounded by art materials. It feels like my life is full of opportunities, because in my studio I can create my reality!
I have been doing art since I was a child, when I was 13 I asked my mum to find a wood-carving workshop I could attend. There was not such a thing for a kid my age where we lived. I'm not sure where that idea came from either. She found a group of women ( in their 30's and 40's ) that where learning wood carving in our area. My mum asked the teacher if she would take me as a student. She said that she had no problem if I felt comfortable with the age difference between me and my fellow students. I attended that studio weekly for 5 years, until I decided I wanted to become a sculptor.
After that I attended several sculptors studios, like Juan Carlos Distefano, Claudia Aranovich, and the painter Viviana Zargón, where I became one of her personal assistants and learnt lots about being a professional artist.
Viviana became one of my mentors and a good friend.
I always wanted to study Arts at university, but the hesitation of an uncertain future, made me doubt. I moved to Patagonia, where the big mountains are in Argentina, and had a short 4 years of life as a professional snowboarder. Even then, when I was having a lot of fun and felt passionate about what I was doing, I was still thinking and practicing art.
At age 23, I decided to return to the city of Buenos Aires, where I was born, and enrolled in the National Arts School Prilidiano Pueyrredon, where I completed my Foundational years, and enjoyed learning the basis of drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking.
In 1999 I decided to be more adventurous, and moved to Barcelona to do my specialization in Sculpture (at the Massana School of Art and Design) and then a second one in Photography (IEFC).