Artist's Avenue

Senior Eliana Enriquez is majoring in art studio with a concentration in sculpture.

This semester, she's taking intermediate sculpture and painting, but she doesn't much like painting because she doesn't "view the world in that type of space," she said. Enriquez stays well-rounded by working with a variety of materials such as wax, metal, clay, wire - random junk collaged together. Her art highlights include fashioning a funny monster out of plastic eyeballs, building a robot out of a stove, and combining a toaster, mason jar and computer parts to make a little creature that made her toast every morning. Anyone who knows her knows to bring her ice cream at her work in the ASUNM Crafts Studio, where she is making a robotic submarine out of wax.

Daily Lobo: Does your family think you're being practical going into sculpture?

Eliana Enriquez: No. Everyone always thinks I'm being crazy, but it doesn't really matter. You do what you want to do with life.

DL: And so this is what you want to do with life - sculpt.

EE: Mmhmm.

DL: So, do you go out to New York and look at sculpture galleries and travel all over the globe and find the most perfect sculpture as inspiration?

EE: No. I wish I could do that. I wish I could travel around and do that. But there are different places up here that I can go to and visit and look at. I mean, there's this place outside of Santa Fe that has this crazy sculpture garden that's just ridiculous. And it's fun to look at because everything is just so current of what people are making, so you get an idea of what everyone else is doing and where everyone else's mind is taking them. As far as inspiration, I look at some of the stuff. Like, there's this artist called Bernini, and the way he would sculpt is amazing. He did the sculptures that are just so ridiculously realistic. He has this one where it's like this man and this woman and they're caught in some sort of fight, and the man is grabbing the woman's thigh and it looks like skin. The marble looks like actual skin. And it's, like, no way in hell could I ever sculpt like that, but it's cool to know you could actually take it to those limits. What I do I'll never consider up to par with that man. But it's fun - it's definitely fun to see where you can take yourself, you know?

DL: Where can you take yourself with sculpture?

EE: It provides me with a way to get to know myself. Like, it's really meditative. Whenever I'm actually doing what I'm doing, nothing else exists except for the fact that I'm existing in that moment. By the time I'm done, it provides me with a lot of knowledge about the way I work and the way that I think. It's not chaos or all these weird social interactions that you have every day. I have a hard time defining myself through that. I don't know.

DL: That's good. That makes sense to me.

EE: It's hard, trying to describe to people. You either get it or you don't get it. I'm sure it's the same thing with everyone else and what they do. You either get why people do what they do or you don't. You either have some sort of understanding where their life is taking them or you don't know.

DL: What would you tell the people about the robotic submarine so they would get what's going on in your head?

EE: Just use your imagination, play - you know what I mean? Everyone's so uptight and wound up all weird, and I just want to giggle most of the time. I just want to laugh at stuff. I don't know. Most things are a joke to me. I just want to enjoy life, so why not just make silly little things? I don't know. It's just a silly creature to me. It's developing a personality as I'm making it, but I can just imagine it foraging through the deep sea with his little robotic gun arm and he'd shoot down some crazy sea creature, and it would be awesome to be able to be inside of this and go on this crazy adventure down into the depths of the ocean floor. Like, who knows what's down there?

DL: Do you like to focus on small things or do you want to make any sort of big sculpture world?

EE: Oh, man. That's my dream, actually. I want to have people be able to walk into a place and completely be taken out of reality and submerged into some sort of crazy environment that they're completely foreign to and have them interact with something that's not real by any means, but it is real because it exists within that place. It has a lot to do with my wanting to just go to different places, and I can't. So, it's like why not just make -

DL: You can't? What, are you on probation?

EE: Well, technically. I'm really, really poor, so I'm stuck where I'm at. But it's fun to create different little things to look at and try to experience visually.. I want them to have some sort of experience with it. I don't know why I want to do that. It's what I feel like I should be doing. Sometimes you spend so much time thinking about what you should be doing, instead of actually doing it, that by the time you look back, you realize you never actually did anything.

DL: This dream project of yours - can you describe some elements of it? What it would look like?

EE: The land would be filled with some sort of yellow fields and these beautiful layered flowers but at the same time you couldn't get too close because as pretty and beautiful as everything is in this world, it also has a sense of danger to it. You don't know what you're getting yourself into, and that's the fun of it, you know what I mean? I really like electric blues and baby blues, so the sky would be filled with those, and as the sun set it would be some sort of - like, when the sun's setting here it turns that weird pink color - and that's how it would be but that's how nighttime is. As soon as nighttime hits, it's like this haze and it's just thick and as you walk through it, it smells like springtime and all this flowery stuff just sort of dying, like in the fall, and you can walk through all these fields and all these forests, and there's, like, patches of desert. There definitely has to be desert in this place.