Paula Proaño Mesías creates hybrid forms that merge the human body with animals or plants. By crossing these boundaries, she explores stories that resist the order of human dominance.
Her new work, A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide, is inspired by the children’s beach toys such as buckets, shovels, and sand molds. The sculptures are 3D-printed with recycled plastic, reflecting her view that toys are the first tools through which we learn how to shape and imagine the world.
Drawing from the living creatures of Dadaepo, the artist presents playful objects for both children and adults. These sculptures suggest the skeletons of crabs found in the Nakdong River estuary, yet also resemble imagined marine organism. They are not meant only for display, but for touch and movement. Visitors are encouraged to pick up, rearrange, and inscribe movements into the sand or water. In that way, they experience their own bodies extending into other forms of life. For the artist, play becomes a way to build kinship with species different from ourselves.
Emerging from a search for solidarity among diverse life forms, the work invites us to imagine many kinds of bodies and the connections between them. These prosthetic hybrid sculptures embody a flexible and open attitude that listens to the unseen lives breathing beneath our feet, beyond the human realm.
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