María: Life Before the Fire
Sara Iraburu
National College of Art and Design Dublin
This project springs from absence: a woman who exists only in the form of fire. María appears only once in history, in the record of her trial, condemned as a witch and burned at the stake. There is no voice, only the words of the men who decided her fate. She survives as a name written on paper, a life reduced to that version of herself. Four hundred and fifty years later, I attempt to remember her by imagining what cannot be known. How do you remember someone who has been forgotten? How do you give voice to a life that was never allowed to speak? I think about charcoal: the residue of pain that still leaves its mark, that stains, that insists. By working with charcoal, absence becomes a place to inhabit. Not to fill the silence, but to sit beside it and allow it to speak in its own way.