KIPUKA

From the exhibition *Paisajes Interrumpidos* (Interrupted Landscapes), curated by Viviana Mejía.

*Kipuka* is a Hawaiian term meaning “opening” and “change of form.” It refers to the fragments of land that remain surrounded by lava following an eruption—islands of life forced to transform amidst isolation.

Lucía Fernández-Ardisana revisited this concept after witnessing the 2024 eruption on La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain). In the freedom with which the lava carved its path across the landscape, she found a question that would define her practice: Can a drawing be free? Trained in figurative art and academic discipline, the artist faced the possibility of breaking beyond her formal training—of allowing the line to flow with the same unpredictable force as a natural phenomenon.

During the isolation of the pandemic, she began a monumental 21-meter-long drawing. Houses, streets, palm trees, and splashes of color emerged in the initial strokes, yet gradually, the figurative forms dissolved. The charcoal broke free, giving rise to a frenetic, organic mass that seemed to yearn to spill beyond the boundaries of the paper.

Thus, *Kipuka* becomes a territory of opening and transformation—a laboratory where the line reinvents itself much like the land after an eruption: poised between destruction and origin, between the known and the untamable.