Dina Torrans
Flower compositions are not just about beauty, colours and technical virtuosity. For artists like Dina Torrans, the subject of flowers becomes an investigation into the natural world and its priceless interconnections.
Dina’s floral sculptures look like precious jewellery. Refined to the minute details and characterized by the combination of varied materials, they appear like a precious gift donated by nature. However, the approach of the mixed-media artist is more than just about aesthetic charm. Thanks to their harmonious shapes and proportions, flowers are a source of inspiration, but they also trigger a reflection about their importance in the ecosystem.
For Dina, the observation phase is always a powerful and rewarding experience. She focuses on the design and proportions of flowers and searches for anthropomorphic features.
The sculptures in Dina’s flower series have beautiful and frail connotations but reveal a form of vague melancholy. They are flowers of beautiful gardens but also embody the idea of feeling fragile and trapped in the world of the imagination, distant from tangible reality.
From a technical point of view, Dina’s artistic practice can translate microscopic nature into sculptural form. The artist skillfully combines traditional and contemporary sculptural techniques, using waxes and then casting in bronze or silver through the lost wax process. The lost wax casting, already used in Greek and Roman Art and became famous at the height of the Renaissance, allows for a complete adherence to the natural object, creating a wax expendable model. Using this method, Dina captures fine details of the flower in metal. To this magic, the artist adds a purely human imprint: porcelain, bones, and found objects embellish the sculptural flower, playing with nature and its idea of it.
The references in Dina’s floral series are multiple and interdisciplinary, integrating art and botany, sculpture and natural sciences: from the organic moulds of sculptors such as Henry Moore, capable of synthesizing nature into abstract 20th-century forms, to the millimetre-perfect observation of all naturalists-illustrators, like Ernst Haeckel or the pioneering female entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian. With these names, Dina shares methodic observation and the ability to absorb nature’s infinite and diverse forms.
Dina Torrans has been working as a sculptor and multi-media artist in Toronto for over twenty-five years. Graduated with honours from the Art Centre of Central Technical School, she subsequently worked as an instructor in the Sculpture and Printmaking departments and as a Visiting Artist at numerous workshops and seminars in other academic institutions. Her award-winning artworks have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions. They are included in many private and public collections, such as the Canadian Sculpture Centre in Toronto, the Fire Arts in Vermont and the Earth House Hold Studios in California. Dina’s artistic research into the natural and human world reveals an attentive, sensitive eye capable of revealing invisible interconnections to be explored with a magnifying glass.
Dina Torrans is the Gold Artist of the ArtAscent Floral call for artists. To see the full body of work and profile, get a copy of the ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal Floral issue.
