Light in the Matter
Deep inside the depths of a mine—perhaps the closest earthly contact with the core of the great Mother—an explorer can slip into a dreamlike submersion, akin to descending into a dark ocean: a deep blue environment where azurite and malachite evoke a mineral-covered coral reserve. In the depths of the mine, light does not fully reveal space; it grazes surfaces, hesitates, and dissolves, transforming the act of seeing into a tactile, unstable experience.
The ground inside the Texeo copper mine in northern Spain reinforces this illusion: muddy and sticky, it produces a bodily sense of depth and immersion, oscillating between subterranean space and seabed. Earth and ocean, soil and water, collapse into a single perceptual territory.
Meanwhile, these two minerals—one a soft copper blue born from pressure, briefly holding light before yielding to change, the other slowly turning green as it breathes with air and water—suggest depth and transition between worlds: inside and outside, visibility and blindness, the physicality of matter and the immateriality of light.
This photographic series is composed of four printed screenshots taken from La luz en la materia, a video recorded inside the Texeo (Mount Aramo) mine during a research trip in November 2022. By extracting still images from the moving sequence, the work suspends time, presenting fragments of perceptual uncertainty and disorientation: traces of an encounter with a place where light, matter, and the body negotiate their limits.
Inma Herrera (ES/FI)
Inma Herrera (ES/FI) is a visual artist, printmaker, bodyworker, and educator whose practice explores the alchemy and material transformation of image-making processes. Through installations that bridge printmaking, sculpture, video, and performance, she creates spaces that invite states of becoming. Her work engages with matter through the elemental forces of Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire, studying the concept of imprint where the human body becomes both vessel and catalyst. These explorations intertwine with references to the history of print, Hermetism, and psychology, unfolding connections that are at once conceptual and poetic.
Born in Madrid in 1986 and rooted in Andalusian heritage, Inma Herrera studied Fine Arts and Art Creation & Research (MA) at the Complutense University of Madrid, later training as a Print Media Specialist at the Spanish Royal Mint’s School of Printmaking and Graphic Design. In 2014, she moved to Finland with a Postgraduate Award from Obra Social La Caixa to pursue an MFA at Uniarts Helsinki, graduating in 2017.
Her work has been recognized with the Ducat Prize 2020, the Pilar Juncosa & Sotheby’s Biennial Award for Artistic Creation 2019 (with Shirin Salehi), and residencies at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (2017–18) and ARTICA Svalbard (2022, 2024). She has been nominated for the Queen Sonja Print Award (NO, 2020) and the Kjell Nupen Memorial Grant (2017).
Recent solo exhibitions include A Simple Gesture (F2 Gallery, Madrid, 2025), When We Thought the Sky Was Made of Stone (Sculptor Gallery, Helsinki, 2024), They Change Their Body into Spirit (HAM Gallery, Helsinki, 2023), A Tierra. Nacida de una Roca (Museo Barjola, Gijón, 2023), Solo Project (ARCO Madrid, 2021), and A Fixed Point to Be Oriented (Fundació Miró Mallorca, 2021 - with Shirin Salehi). Selected group exhibitions include Subterranean (Amos Rex, Helsinki, 2022), La vista y el tacto (ca. 1929–30) (Centro Federico García Lorca, Granada, 2021), Vis à Siv (Pas une Orange, Barcelona, 2021), Give Me Space (IPCNY, New York, 2020), Resemblance Through Contact: Grammar of Imprint (Tartu Art House / EKA Tallinn, 2020), Climbing Through the Tide (B7L9, Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis, 2019), Processi 145 (Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, 2018), Crossections (Vienna, Helsinki, Stockholm, 2017–2019), and El Barco de Teseo. AECID Cultural Center. CCE Mexico and Managua / Madrid, 2015-2016).
Alongside her artistic practice, Herrera is a certified Somatic Therapist, Taiyo Martial Arts instructor, Kundalini Yoga practitioner, and student of the Inca Healing Tradition. These embodied and energetic disciplines deeply inform her material- and process-based approach. She is currently based in Helsinki, where she works with bodywork clients, develops her artistic projects, and teaches at Uniarts Helsinki, LUT University, and the Helsinki Healing Arts Center.
