Fleur's Dolls Song 2014

Nieves Mingueza made "Fleur's Dolls Song" from found images that she collaged. This piece is a tonal study in browns and greens. It invites us to slow down. I notice that the work is made from layers of paper with torn edges, and that the paper itself has a gritty, tactile quality. The figure has a kind of ghostly pallor. Look at the way the blue green backdrop is partially ripped and peeling away. It's like the image is decaying before our eyes. But it also has a weird kind of beauty. The way the artist has used the edges of the paper as part of the composition gives it a raw, unfinished feel, like the work is still in process. This reminds me of Kurt Schwitters. Like him, Nieves Mingueza finds poetry in the overlooked fragments of everyday life, and transforms them into something new. Art is always a process of re-imagining and re-combining, of finding new connections between things.