Drawing is central to Hondartza’s practice, which employs a diverse range of materials, techniques, scales, and styles. Many works combine analogue and digital means of image-making, where subjects are explored through multiple iterations. Beyond anything else, her work conveys the experience of corresponding with things that are difficult to apprehend for being too big or too small, too distant or too close, but also too ephemeral, fragile, or hazardous. She uses ‘things’ as an overarching term to include places or objects, materials, concepts, real or imagined. The sea and outer space are recurrent sources of inspiration. The starting points come often from archives and museum collections, but other works emerge from an open-ended interactions with the materials at hand in the studio.

Recent projects have included commissions or residencies responding to the 1815 geological map by William Smith at North Lincolnshire Museum (2021), Leeds Art Gallery’s Cotman/Kitson archive (2017) the site and history of Jodrell Bank Observatory (2016); amongst others. My work is featured in Vitamin D3: Today’s Best Contemporary Drawing by Phaidon (2021). Her miniature art project Beyond Scale Gallery, started in 2020 as a response to the lockdown and has since featured multiple exhibitions by other contemporary artists.

Hondartza was born in 1982 in A Coruña, Spain and lives and works in Leeds, UK. She has a PhD (practice-led) by the University of Leeds (2024), an MA Fine Art Practice from Sheffield Hallam University (2007) and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from The University of the Basque Country (2005). Fraga’s work is represented by Espacio Alexandra (Spain) and The Art Court (UK).

To get in touch, you may email Hondartza here.