Tasmanian Totems
Greta Diaz Ortiz
Daily opening times:
25 January – 12 February, 2024
10am – 4pm
Tasmanian Totems is a timely reminder that life is a beautiful but ultimately fragile endeavor and memento mori. Kitsch but never vulgar, this collection will focus your mind on one universal truth: that all shall pass eventually, with beauty as the epicentre. In a philosophically way: death doesn’t exist.
Greta Diaz Ortiz has a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from the Polytechnical University of Valencia (2011), traveling extensively since to satisfy her intense interest in the natural world and the cultural fabric it supports.
Paying her peripatetic way for over a decade as a tattoo artist she landed in Tasmania in 2020 and immediately responded to the immense natural beauty of her new home. After participating in a number of art collaborations in Hobart she decided to create her first solo exhibition in Tasmania with a focus on her passions: art and nature.
Being disconnected from nature damages the human soul. Bringing pieces of nature to your intimate place evokes bucolic feelings while stimulating renewed connections. These pieces demand veneration for the natural world by emphasizing the dichotomy of perfect imperfection: perfection does not exist in nature, no matter how much we strive for it.
Totems historically are pieces of nature which connect individuals with their raison d’etre. Humans appreciate the spiritual significance, bringing totems to their ancestor’s memories. We believe and behave as though the earth belongs to us when in reality the equation is the other way around.
Tasmanian Totems as a collection seeks to stimulate your subconscious and reconnect you with your senses and spirituality.
The artist mixes media to create pieces which are unique and yet related. Visitors are invited on an organic journey through hidden memories to our tribal instincts via works forged from the elemental to stimulate the senses. Reflections of life and death await, with beauty existing in both phases. Beauty is the connection in this idiosyncrasy, the world is always full of beauty and even if we cannot appreciate it is stills there, the never ending love of Nature.
Manifesting her influences through repurposed discharged animal bones, sponges, feathers, wood, sand and diverse recycled material from across Tasmania affords these natural remnants a second life; beauty renewed.
Creating pieces which allow pure nature airs and graces befitting their existence, some of Greta’s important influences include: animism, shamanism, mysticism and the occult. Greta’s passion for nature springs from an exaltation of the elements: water meets earth meets air meets metal.
Flamboyant representations of the natural world in settings spannin the realm of fortune from majestic to morbid. To conjure reflections on the essence of life.
