Lorena Madrazo makes poetic, speculative artefacts from reclaimed materials and unruly living systems. At the heart of her practice is the creation of sculptural works that combine hands-on craft practices with storytelling about an imagined future that is both degraded and regenerating.

Her works feel like ritual remnants or contemporary human fossils. Mysterious and beastly objects that might be texts or canvases or discarded household objects from the deep past or the far-future take on new and inscrutable meanings in Madrazo's hands. She assembles uncanny and bewitching shapes from reclaimed fibres, wool from traceable transhumant flocks, flower scraps, loose threads, plant matter, live mycelium, and negative space, sometimes glossing the objects with agar, or using agar to dry the works to a texture reminiscent of leather or preserved skin. Her embellishments are at once organic, excruciatingly delicate, and hirsute. They are subject to decay, though they appear to be unsettlingly resistant to the workings of climate and time. These pieces tell a story of entanglement, care, ecological responsibility, recuperation and refusal.

Madrazo is interested in the intelligence, agency, and even disobedience of her materials. She is fascinated by texture, raw margins, and borderlands, and she uses the simplest of tools: knots, knitting, the basic loom, and the phone in the pocket. She collects what nobody plants and nobody names, and finds ways to collaborate with living biomaterials. Wool scraps, threads, fruit nets, ropes, bioplastics, onion, eggshell, and coffee grinds are all found in the reclaimed textures she works with. She finds that the most interesting things happen at the edges: of materials, of disciplines, of paths.

A new development in Madrazo's practice is the creation of glitchy digital transmutations of her 'relic' works. She uses the most accessible of 3D scanning processes to iterate versions of the sculptural artefacts — a kind of primitive digital surgery that can't help but alter the artefact's DNA — then sets them eerily rotating in new wastelands or wildernesses. The resulting videos have a makeshift, hand-held feeling, and the digital relics retain an almost defiant retro tactility and texture. They long to be touched, but are left to orbit agelessly in the collective cloud while the terrestrial relic remains subject to the pressures of atmosphere and gravity.

In her practice as a visual artist and installation sculptor, Madrazo draws on her background and training as a designer and teacher. She aims to forge intimate ecologies and speculative futures that honour the intelligence of craft and to work with materials as active collaborators. Her work is a soft challenge to received modes of labour and consumption — proposing new modes of care and reclamation, and privileging the anthropoperipheral in all its feral, anarchic loveliness and mess.