Lady Death and her Peculiar Companions

Caroline Murta: For some time now, the theme of death has occupied a place of constant tension in my work. Not without reason; we encountered each other very early. When I had just turned one year old, my father was murdered.
Many people think that those who work with this theme have already made peace with it or found some kind of answer. In my case, it is completely the opposite: death has always been one of my greatest fears, and paradoxically, it gradually became a great obsession mixed with fascination. I was heading down a more morbid path with it, until one day I suffered such an intense panic attack that it became a turning point in my life. Much of my work was born from the attempt to process the fissure that panic brought.
It was precisely from this relatively safe place that I was able to face my inner monsters and traumas, understanding how I, too, am these monsters. Since then, as I work through one aspect of death, it returns wearing a new guise, as if inviting me to face it from a different angle, revealing a new form.

I believe my work emerges much more from a perception, from a way of looking itself, and from my relationship with my shadow side.
A feeling of strangeness has accompanied me since a very early age, and it has greatly shaped the way I perceive myself and the things around me. When I explore the fantastic, for example, I do not see it as escapism, but as a faithful way of expressing how I see the world.
This way of looking runs through everything I do, whether in my personal projects or in editorial illustration. Perhaps life is that place where the ordinary and the extraordinary coexist and blend together all the time, and that alone is an inexhaustible source of astonishment and enchantment for me.

I think I have always had a very strong need to feel that the emotions I illustrated were as true as I experienced them. As a child I would spend hours absorbed in fairy tales and was fascinated by the black and white illustrations. I think that was where this desire to tell stories through drawing was born, and to take everything to a slightly more exaggerated and dramatic place. Little by little, I realized that graphic language, prints, and illustrations possessed exactly that power.

My greatest influences come from Expressionism, for the way it shifts reality into the subjective realm, and from Art Nouveau, with its sinuous and organic forms. But they also come from my most vivid nightmares. From the dense bluish fog that evokes a nostalgic magic in the cemeteries of 1980s films. From Gothic architecture ruined by time yet still overwhelming and sublime. From post-mortem photographs whose dead eyes seem to have accessed some truth beyond the veil. I find myself wondering what they saw.

In the end, it was a very organic development, and it still continues to be. I don’t understand my visual language as something finished, but as something in constant progress.

Absolutely, childhood is perhaps one of my greatest sources of inspiration, actually. Even if not for entirely happy reasons, it remains a very alive and vibrant territory for me. It is in childhood that the roots of almost everything I have been developing over time are found, and much of the sense of play that appears in my work is born from an umbilical cord directly connected to childhood memories and to that delicate boundary between reality, dreams, and imagination.
When I played, for example, it was the “others” that I also sought to give a voice to. I’d spend hours drawing paper dolls and creating narratives between them. It was actually something that stayed with me throughout my childhood and into adolescence, and my main characters were always troubled, deviant, grotesque, as I was also influenced by the plots of soap operas, films and literature I consumed. When I look back and see that from childhood I sought to give a voice to the misunderstood and that artistic practice has always accompanied me, I realize I had no way of escaping who I’ve become today.

Great observation, many of my works are crossed by a kind of humor, really, but it took me quite a while to notice it. Back in university I noticed that whenever I showed some of my work to a professor, which were often creatures with bulging eyes and horrified expressions, she’d let out a kind of embarrassed laugh, and at other times she pointed out that my work seemed childish. At the time, I associated the expression of horror very much with my experience with panic, so I took all of that very seriously and her feedback ate away at me for a while.
But my relationship with my art changed over time and I soon realized that having humor, exaggeration and even a certain childlike dimension wasn’t a shortcoming at all. Quite the opposite, it actually revealed layers of myself that I didn’t understand very well before, but today perhaps it’s precisely this coexistence of ambiguities that interests me most.
So no, I don’t really mind if my art provokes horror, unease, laughter, in fact, realizing that it can evoke something in whoever looks at it already means a lot to me.

I love how the deep contrast between light and shadow intensifies everything: textures, forms, the atmosphere, the dramatic weight of a scene. I have the impression that when colors disappear, attention shifts toward the expressions and the emotional weight of the image, and that is precisely what interests me most to explore.

I am quite critical of generative AI. Although I don’t consider what it reformulates based on other people’s work to be art, I think the biggest issue is not whether something made with full or partial AI assistance is or is not art, but rather the economic and unethical logic operating behind it.
It bothers me tremendously to think that these systems depend on being fed by human effort and labor only to then contribute to the very erasure of that human effort and labor. In the end who is producing this raw material and who is profiting from its value?
It is reassuring to see that resistance to AI remains strong within the creative field, and that despite all the seduction this tool provokes there is a large number of people who fight for and value the human, imperfect and intuitive process of creation more.

At the moment, I see myself as an exuberant spider with 8 potentially agile, killer arms, but deep down I’m nothing more than a zombie girl slowly dragging herself through the hours, missing an arm or a leg, all patched up, with dried-out eyes and ruined nails. But what matters is not to stop dragging myself along, even if I leave a greasy trail of blood and flesh behind me (lol).
And maybe that’s art, too.