What tools you couldn’t live without in your work?

My drawing box with automatic pencils, rubbers, rulers, sand paper for the tip of the leads, a cutter and heavy acid free paper. I also need my collection of pressed flowers in slides and a slide viewer and … a comfortable clean table, a big chair and good light.

My notebooks need to be around too, they are full of ideas, sketches, possible projects, to do lists, inspiring sources, quotes…

Music is not strictly necessary but it makes my day happier.

What inspires you?

Mainly books and nature, also art, life, contemporary culture…beauty and pain.

Sometimes I can be inspired by something as specific as a shade of lemon green or a line in an elegy.

What motivates you?

To see my work enlarge and mature, and to be able to grasp some kind of far away enlighting knowledge.

I need to get ideas out of my head so they stop calling me. When they are good it is beautiful to see them materialize first and then outgrow me. If they don’t work as I imagined it can be frustrating, but it is far more frustrating to not try them out at all.

What you would be doing if it wasn’t art?

I could be a jewelry maker, I would love having a workshop full of tiny boxes and pliers…or I could work surrounded by books while running a small arty book label or.

My work can be seen at The End, Jacob’s Island Gallery, London (31 May – 28 July) An exhibition based on works that reference memento mori, vanitas and funerary art about death and vanitas.

Also at TLC site and www.mercedesbaliarda.com

See other Tools Of My Trade.