CANOA LAB
In 2016, Raquel Vidal and Pedro Paz, launched CANOA, a place to objectify their experience through a production of metal and ceramic pieces focused in handcraft value and in artistic experimentation.
We come from two different places in Spain, Galicia and Almería. It could be said that, in order to meet , we’ve had to cover one of the longest diagonals of our country. We’ve worked together in many projects, which let us do continuous research in different but convergent directions derived from painting and sculpting fields, always wondering about the irrefutable space-time relationship. After several years of work in which we combined our most plastic production with image projects linked to photography, video, graphic and art direction, we came across metal and clay, two materials which, being strongly connected, caught our attention in terms of durability and because they have undoubtedly marked the development of our society.
We live and develop our work at Valencia together with our newly arrived André.
Your greatest inspirations or influences?
Our focus has a strong naturalistic and historical character. We find the ancient forms and ancestral ways of production that interest us so much throughout different times in history . We continually observe primitive designs produced with as little tools as possible and above all we pay special interest to The Iberian, Roman and Greek designs, which are an intrinsic part of our Mediterranean culture. Looking at what surrounds us we find textures, colors and shapes that the natural world offers if you dedicate the right time to its observation. This influence is mixed with the imaginary of designers such as Lucie Rie, Hans Cooper, Ewen Henderson or Johannes Nagel.
Tell us a bit about your creative process?
Our creative process is not subject to a previous single and concrete idea that may develop later, rather it is a becoming, a continuum in which one thing leads to another. We try to think and reflect on processes without a concrete opening and closure, one idea accompanies us to meet another. We draw and observe objects all the time, archive images that throughout the process are present, make sketches and small experiments that serve us to think and rethly about the shapes, textures, structures and images that we could do once the pieces are finished. But all this happens parallel to the construction of our objects, without a clearly differentiated before or after, we could say that we build thinking and think about building.
Ceramics and metal allow us to review ways from the past into the present, two trades that need a slow production time which makes the observation and acquisition of small fragments indispensable for the creation of cartography. Experimentations with glazes, with natural beeswax and its subsequent casting process, experimentation with the shapes and hybridization of both materials are territories rich in processes which deserve to be observed and from which we obtain samples for our future study.
This makes us feel like metal and clay archeologists.
How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the world changing moving forward?
Since André was born, our days have changed a lot and our organization is quite organic and full of unpredictable leads, as it is him the one who conducts the working times. Otherwise nothing has changed The time we spend on the project and each piece will remain very important to us. Our objects are born from being always observing, thinking and making, a gerundio that accompanies us from the beginning of the project. This immersive temporality makes every step we take critically thought out and analyzed, learning from mistakes, and trying to maintain a consistent and more robust line of work every day that passes.
What does wellbeing mean to you?
To have the possibility to manage our own time and share each minute together.