When there is a closed, predetermined path—such as the ascent and descent of a staircase—the forms usually proposed to intervene in it and employ it as an exhibition space are almost infinite, though they nearly always result in a subordination of the space to the artwork. Sandra Mar’s exhibition proposes altering this relationship by turning her sculptures into an integrated part of the staircase and resignifying the materiality of the elements that make up the site.

The title of the exhibition precisely expresses this underlying tension that sustains Sandra Mar’s work and relates to an antinomy of materials. It seeks to induce unexpected natures in opposing objecthoods: fluidity in solidity, life in the inert, the puddle in the arid. In this way, the railings—typical of the simplest and most precarious modernist styles of the period, whose silhouettes evoke the forms of leaves and other elements associated with the organic in art—incorporate new sculptural volumes and extensions as if acting in accordance with their appearance as living beings, capable of generating new shoots and branches, stretching and twisting.

The containment of bodily antagonisms is also present in the pieces on the landings, in the vases that appear, at first glance, solid and entirely compact. Symbolic motifs of home and domestic life, they are interior sculptures, containers for other decorations. This time, positioned on the staircase at the threshold of the house, they result in a contradiction between parts: inside, they serve as refuge and shelter, collecting a kind of fluid—stagnant, residual—while on the outside they contrast with the dry and sterile condition of the walls. In these representations, the crack—understood as the collapse of material—is precisely what makes a change of state possible and what harbors new alternatives of being.

Hard Waters, Soft Lands invites us to redefine our perception of permanence and inconsistency in materiality through a poetics of instability. Beginning with sculptural matter itself, it reflects on cracking, rupture, and residue as necessary conditions for change and transformation.