About
BIO
Maria José Arceo was born in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and moved to London in 1984. She graduated with BA Honours in Fine Art from Camberwell Art School (1992) and later with a Postgraduate in Art and Design Education from Goldsmith University (2001).
Maria's work has shown strong links with archaeology, oceanography, and science and most of her artworks are based on the systematic study of how human 'footprints' manifest in water. The focus of her artistic practice began in 1991 with an exploration of salt as the footprint left by evaporating water. Her investigation soon focused on one of the most alarming examples of desertification processes caused by human miss-manipulation of natural Water Ecosystems. The almost total disappearance of the Aral Sea -the world's fourth-largest lake in the 60s became the inspiration for her degree show in 1992. Meanwhile, her research exposed a more sinister type of human footprint microscopically embedded within these specs of crystal dust. Today, ninety per cent of the sea's original area has become a toxic barren wasteland and renamed 'The Aralkum Desert'.
In 1994, after participating in a group exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall in London, the artist suffered a traumatic spinal accident and had to undergo a lengthy course of physiotherapy to regain full use of her legs. Her first solo exhibition, entitled CIRCUITOUS, London (2007), maps her recovery process.
Since then, she has participated in numerous exhibitions, fairs, and festivals and collaborated with architects and scientists on water-related environmental projects. Among these: 'BIOMIMICRY - CORAL REEF ecoMACHINES _WORLD INCUBATORS' with ecoLogicStudio and the AA (Architects Association) in Dubai. 'EMPOOLING LANDSCAPES', with the University of East London, for construction in the salt marshes of Coto Doña Ana National Park in Andalucia, Spain.
For the past twenty-two years, she has been surveying the banks of the Thames, looking for any residues that may reveal how human footprints manifest in water. Her exploration began with the discovery of pieces of leather shoes, some over 2000 years old. These literal footprints from the past were found adjacent to their modern equivalents in the form of plastics. Hence, these discarded plastic polymers -that are creating an entirely new geological layer in the Anthropocene- have become the focus of her artworks for the last twelve years. Although most of her recent pieces are made from just this type of human-generated footprint, she believes that to understand the issues that plastic will generate for the future; we need to cross-reference it against preceding human waste incarnations -materials such as leather, wood, metal, glass, ceramics, stone, bones and of course plastics-.
For her, the river acts as a fluid barrel, churning the sediments of time while randomly depositing clues from the city's past onto its shores. Collectively, these deposits are representative of the kind of footprints that society leaves as a reminder of its material culture. Her artworks based on these residues are unlike other archaeological investigations of the past in that they challenge how we conceptualise our present and envisage the future.
Hence, for the last twelve years, she has concentrated on producing time-capsule-like artworks intended as visual quantifications of the alarming amounts of discarded plastic found in water. These static views of the present, inferring distressing perspectives for our future, may subsequentially help provide undisturbed frames of reference to the slow degradation of these polymers and serve as potential chemical windows into the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
She began using colour separation to illustrate the sedimentary strata that would identify our presence in the planet's future and challenge our perception of the inherent value in our waste. While methodically sorting and separating plastics, she began to gather the dust from the studio's floor onto a sieve, expecting to separate them from the sand and soil mix. Realising that the resulting filtered dust was mainly mixed-coloured plastics prompted her research on water-based microplastics.
In 2014, after sharing her findings on micro-plastics at Gustav Metzger's 'Facing Extinction' conference, she was invited to join a group of 14 women as artist-in-residence on a scientific sailing expedition across the Atlantic. The purpose of the trip was to collect samples and investigate the presence of microplastic contaminants on the water's surface. These were first analysed onboard and then shared with a wide range of international research projects such as The Marine Litter Watch (UN Environmental Agency); A Safe Planet Campaign (UNEP); Phytoplankton Secchi Disk Project (Plymouth University); Marine Environmental Research Institute MERI (Maine USA); MTM Research Centre (Örebro University, Sweden).
On her return, she realised that to capture the public's attention to issues of plastic waste in water; she needed to make the problem resonate personally with them and decided to focus on locally found litter. She came up with THAMES PLASTIC AND THE EXPLORATION OF FUTURE DUST (2016-17), a multidisciplinary project as an artist-in-residence with King's College London designed to foster collaborative interactions between art and science with the public. The idea was to provide academics, students and volunteers with opportunities for interaction and hands-on learning about the issues that London's discarded waste causes in its most immediate aquatic environment: The Thames.
By generating opportunities for public interaction at different stages in the creation of FUTURE DUST (2017) -the official installation commission for the Totally Thames Festival 2017- she provided opportunities to experience, first-hand, the unconscious change in perception that occurs while separating a pile of mixed rubbish into a colour-separated stockpile of valuable and recyclable material.
Then, in 2019 she was commissioned to create: PLASTICO A MAREAS, a double immersive plastic installation for the Hejduk Towers of the 'Fundacion Cidade Da Cultura De Galicia' (Spain) with the purpose to commemorate 2019's International Environment Day.
Soon afterwards, she was invited to participate in PLASTIC MATTER (2020), a group show at the Atrium Gallery of Hertfordshire University's Arts Faculty. The university also commissioned her to conduct several talks and workshops with local groups as the basis for a NEW GEOGRAPHIES COMMISSION PROJECT (partnership art programme between England and the Netherlands), which, unfortunately, was cancelled due to the pandemic.
Since then, as well as taking part in various exhibitions, Maria has been working on a series of ensuing art and education projects derived as further explorations of water as a carrier for messages and information. Together with her 22-year comprehensive material archive of artefacts, these undertakings are leading to a comprehensive study of water as an intrinsic medium vested with the ability to mould individuality and capable of revealing residual testimonies to our collective memory. Despite water's inherent transparency, we seemed utterly ineffectual in detecting the echoes of our presence mirrored by its essence. Arceo intends to explore the varying spatial scales for these refractions and as explicit representations for an inferred water's memory.