Josefina Sumar: Tactile Discord and the Poetics of Disrepair

In Josefina Sumar’s sculptural lexicon, the body emerges not as a stable referent but as a contested terrain—unruly, fractured, and insistently material. Her recent work, encompassing ceramic assemblage, textile intervention, and photographic performance, engages in an aesthetics of corporeal estrangement that resists resolution. Rather than presenting the body as subject, Josefina positions it as process: a mutable site of trauma, resistance, and tentative repair.

Within series such as Inners and Get Yourself Together, shown during her residency at MASS Education, Sumar activates a tension between formal abstraction and visceral reference. The contorted ceramic tubes of Inners recall internal organs not through mimetic precision but via affective resonance—suggesting esophageal contortion, digestive loops, or obstructed flow.

Materially, Josefina’s practice is guided by a tactility that borders on the confrontational. Clay, fabric, stuffing, thorns, and found debris are not merely mediums but signifiers—each indexed to states of excess, rupture, and vulnerability. In works like Oops (2025), textile forms sprawl across the floor in what appears as a half-domestic, half-anatomical spillage. These anthropomorphic silhouettes function as uncanny vessels: familiar yet estranged, playful yet grotesque. There is an intentional semiotic slippage here—the body appears only in fragments, often abject, never whole.

The shift from ceramic to soft sculpture marks not only a material transition but an epistemological one. If ceramics encode containment and control, the textile works operate through leakage, folding, and collapse. Josefina’s engagement with softness is anything but passive; it becomes a site of critical intensity. Her use of textile stuffing, for instance, complicates the notion of interiority—stuff bursts out, stretches, recoils. These forms undermine sculptural containment, foregrounding instability as both formal and conceptual strategy.

In Get Yourself Together, Josefina turns to recuperation, but not in any linear, redemptive sense. Constructed from fragments of discarded ceramic works—often remnants of other artists’ failures—these sculptures do not obscure damage; they monumentalize it. Resting on precarious cardboard plinths of uneven height, each piece offers a non-hierarchical, affectively syncopated meditation on assemblage and survival. What emerges is not so much a narrative of healing as an ethics of maintenance—imperfect, unheroic, and deeply embodied.

This insistence on fragmentation extends into Efimeral Bodies, a photographic suite in which Josefina inserts her own body into makeshift sculptural arrangements. These images hover between performance and self-portraiture, translating the tactile grammar of her installation work into staged corporeal tableaux. The neologism “Efimeral”—a hybrid of “ephemeral” and its Spanish cognate—encapsulates the linguistic slippage that runs throughout her oeuvre. Language, like the body, is rendered partial, contingent, and in flux.

What distinguishes Josefina’s practice is her capacity to make material speak—not symbolically, but indexically. Hers is a poetics of disrepair: a sculptural idiom in which fragmentation, softness, and decay become forms of knowledge. In an art world increasingly seduced by digital sheen and conceptual coolness, Josefina reasserts the urgency of the visceral. Her work compels us not to look for coherence or catharsis, but to sit with discomfort as a generative space.