Marta Corada: Slippery Altered Realities
July 12th, 2024
By Liv Collins
It’s a bright Monday morning, and I’m sat with my laptop open, coffee in hand, waiting for the artist Marta Corada to join the call. She swiftly fills my screen, with warm words from a peach-coloured room. Marta Corada is a contemporary artist working at the intersections of photography, sculpture and fine art, and her artwork is like nothing else I’ve ever seen. She asks if I mind if she brews her coffee as we chat. I smile and say not at all. Taking me into her yellow kitchen, she tells me how her practice has evolved from reality-bending photomontages, to disarming animal-esque felt sculptures, and how an artist can always be more than one thing.
Post Memories, Shanghai – Photomontage, 2012
Marta Corada is originally from Spain, and now lives and works in London. Sipping her coffee, she muses how her art practice has taken her around the world, but it was in Shanghai, China, where her career initially took off. There on an art residency in 2012, she decided to explore this vast city, armed with her observant eyes and camera in hand. She discovered surreal, wide-open urban landscapes and spent hours photographing them. Later, she would comb through these images, and digitally combine elements from a few of her favourites, to create one single photomontage. Her technical skills are second-to-none, as each of these final photomontages appear at first glance, to be one single snapshot.
These works blur the lines between documentary photography and fiction, between storytelling and fact - all done in the most eyeball-massaging, brain-stimulating, kind of way. The people in her images were in this same place, on the same day, but never at exactly the same time. Through Marta’s intuitive digital rearranging, she introduces these people to each other creating a slick, slippery altered reality. At first, when you look at the photograph below, all seems natural. But zoom in. Look at the abandoned empty pushchair, the man in the suit to the right: standing and staring, the way in which everyone seems to be in the same frame, yet in their own distinct worlds. It’s slightly eerie, confusing and mesmerising in equal measure. Marta adds how it was something about the spacious, fakeness of the landscapes in Shanghai, that engulfed humans and distorted the human scale, that made her start seeing the people as actors in a big scene.
Post Memories, Shanghai – Photomontage, 2012
When Marta arrived in London a decade ago, she quickly became fascinated by the culture of ‘the city workers’. The people (who were predominantly men), dressed in suits, working in intense financial jobs, and, who seemed to her, lived in their own bubble of reality. She decided to set up her camera and tripod opposite a pub, The Market Porter, and observe these city types as they waited, interacted, drank and coalesced at the end of the working day. She spent 3 hours watching, photographing, taking in the same people. But her gaze was not one of judgement, but genuine fascination.
She decided to interview some of the city workers she met by chance. She told me that, “the way they see the world, they’re in their own bubble. And they get hooked on these hits of dopamine and adrenalin, and it’s like ‘aahh I’m gonna make it, I’m gonna make it’”. For some, this city culture is aspirational and a symbol of status and accomplishment (in part due to the immense wealth that circulates in this world). Yet to others it’s a cut-throat, unempathetic industry with a dark, lonely underbelly. She adds that “one of them told me that, he left everything when he was 40. He told me it’s crazy, you live in a parallel world. You think you’re on top of the world because you’re gonna make the next deal. And then he realised, he had lost contact with everyone he loved, and so he left. It’s crazy. I was fascinated by that.”
Post Memories, London – Photomontage, 2014
I wonder if Marta’s deep curiosity for this ‘subculture’ of British society, is observed more keenly from her standpoint as a non-native. She nods and agrees, she can see things clearer, “I try not to judge, I just observe. But people get trapped in those things, right? But I could say the same about other realities. But that one is very iconic.” I like how Marta captures this ‘parallel world’ of city workers, through a curious and compassionate lens. This work also serves as an important reminder that we all have different realities. We all ultimately perceive the world differently - a fact which offers friction or freedom, depending on the way you look at it.
Marta’s photomontages also feel innately feminist. They depict public spaces from the viewpoint of a womxn. Particularly in the photomontage of the London pub, Marta exposes how male-dominated many communal spaces really are. She reveals how public spaces, globally, are often places for men to congregate in, and for womxn to pass through. Photomontage has a rich feminist history, from its pioneer, Hannah Höch, to artists such as Mary Beth Edelson, Mickalene Thomas, and many more. The ripping up of materials, be them physical or digital, and then blending them back together - presenting the world and its faults back to us from the viewpoint of womxn, as well as the imagining of new realities, is what makes this medium so invaluable, and so important.
“I try not to judge, I just observe.”
It’s also clever how Marta captures the passage of time through photomontages that appear to be one fixed scene. The sheer skills she has to splice up lots of photographs, and to then combine them back together in a way which is so seamless is remarkable. She muses how her education in Catalonia, especially working as a photographer in theatres and alongside choreographers, helped her to arrange people in these works in a way which is dramatic, yet true to life. Also really look at each photomontage, and see how the light is never bouncing off people and objects at the wrong angles. These works are a masterclass in Photoshop (and in people watching too).
It’s also worth noting that Marta began creating these polished, surreal photomontages over a decade ago – long before the mainstream use of AI. Her works have the uncanny qualities of the AI-generated images that flood our screens today. But Marta’s works are infused with care, craft, curiosity and passion in a way which no AI machine could ever compete with.
Post Memories, London – Photomontage, 2014
But for the last 8 years, Marta has felt a pull to another medium: sculpture. She stretches her arms across my screen, smiling as she says that an artist does not need to be limited to just one thing. For a long time she felt a pull towards this medium, so she jumped into it creating strange animal-esque felt figures with the faces of human babies. It may sound like a world away from her photomontages, but really it isn’t. She’s creating figures that don’t really belong to this world, but which are still intrinsically tied to it. She’s exploring psychology, fantasy, disarming satire, merging materials and ideas that press the viewer to think twice about what they’re looking at.
Marta Corada is a brave, brilliant artist. The way in which she speaks about her art, through eloquent words animated by her whole body, is so full of passion it’s contagious. Marta is an artist who celebrates her curiosity, leads with intuition, and in doing so creates worlds which demand our attention. I couldn’t have wished for better company to share a Monday morning coffee with.
TÁRTARO - Needle felted merino wool and ceramic parts, 2018
About Marta Corada
Originally from La Rioja, Spain, Marta Corada studied Fine Art & Photography at the Universities of Salamanca & Barcelona. She has had numerous international exhibitions, including James Freeman Gallery in London, Somerset House for The National Open art Competition, and Saatchi Gallery in London and Pantocrator Gallery in Shanghai. Upcoming Exhibitions include a solo exhibition with Sokyo Gallery at their gallery space in Tokyo in Summer 2024, and her first solo exhibition project in Taiwan with Yiri Arts, Taipei. Marta Corada lives and works in London.