"The Feather Collector" is a procedural work by Ana Matey (Madrid, 1978) composed of drawings, videos, photographs, installations, and individual, collective, and participatory actions—the performances that center this proposal—which the artist generates in a specific manner according to the space in which it is presented and according to the stage in which the creative process itself finds itself.
Ana Matey defines "The Feather Collector," her alter ego, as an individual "tired of the frenetic pace of moving through and doing in daily life, of the continuous doing, producing, achieving, competing, possessing, being more, having more…"; a figure that rebels against the acceleration of Western society from the intimate search for emptiness and silence.
It all began seven years ago in Normandy, a place that Ana Matey chose at a specific moment in her life to distance herself from the accelerated pace of the city. In that new environment, away from the noise of the world, she began a daily ritual in the form of long walks in which she dedicated herself to collecting feathers. That repeated act of walking and gathering feathers, conceived as a conscious and full way of living/feeling the body and of observing/feeling what surrounds us, gave rise to a doubt: when is a feather more free?, when it is united with the rest of the feathers, which like it have their function as part of another body? or when it detaches and remains alone without clear function at the mercy of wind, water, or another body giving it movement?
This existential question activated a branching artistic process riddled with great enigmas about our way of living, individually and collectively. For Ana Matey, feathers are "bodies" that lie upon the earth, small bodies that in the collector's actions are presented trapped, liberated, feathers that take flight again, feathers that are lost along the way, feathers that become part of another body again…
Through all the artistic media she uses (drawing, photography, installation, actions…), Ana Matey invokes strong poetic images. The ever-present feathers are surrounded by a symbolic universe populated by ice, water, flour, eggs, threads, breath, mold…elements, all of them, that are in the process of transformation and that carry within themselves the fundamental idea of constant rebirth.
