About

Tosca is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art and ecology. 

Through developing bodies of work incorporating metal, glass, and electronics, Tosca received scholarships from The Corning Museum of Glass, Pilchuck Glass School and The Penland School of Crafts. Her work has been featured at SOFA New York, Culture Canada, Metalsmith Magazine, The Toronto Design Exchange, the Memphis Metal Museum, Urban Glass Brooklyn, Music Works Magazine, and Vector Festival.

Tosca has been awarded artist residencies with Nes, Skagaströnd, The Ayatana Research Program in Ottawa and The Icelandic Visual Artists Association through Sím, Reykjavik Iceland.  In 2019 Tosca was one of the first Bio-Artists in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto in partnership with the Ontario Science Centre, as well as a recipient of the 2019 BigCi Environmental Award at Wollemi National Park within the UNESCO World Heritage site in the Greater Blue Mountains to further explore her work in bio-sonification of fungi and trees with local mycologists and botanists throughout Wollemi, the Sydney Botanical Gardens, and with Māori rangers concerned with Kauri dieback at the Arataki Visitor Centre, New Zealand. 

Tosca founded nanopod: Hybrid Studio maker space in 2005. Continually exploring new materials and tools, Tosca started collaborating artistically with Algae, Physarum polycephalum, and Mycelium in 2016, translating biodata from non-human organisms into music.

Handmade Portraits: Nanopod from Etsy on Vimeo.

Etsy commissioned artist portrait. Videographer, Pascal Perich
Visit my ‘blog’ for current updates, travels, explorations, and adventures abroad!

Life and how we as Human beings interact with it and respond to it, has always fascinated me. Through my own representational language, be it obvious or obscure, I wish to engage the psyche. By employing that which may be real or imagined, I am suggesting a believable structure, yet one not necessarily rational.

Increasingly my practice employs temporal and narrative explorations of self/identity. Continually exploring new materials and tools alongside my metal-smithing, glass and coding background.
Narrative allows me to show imagined futures, reconstructed or mediated pasts that conjecture the implications technology, science and politics have on self/identity, our shared environment through a multi-disciplinary approach, often combining tactile, sculptural forms, and audio.

I view my research as a collaborative effort with the non-Human entities I touch, caress, grow. Having ‘minds’ of their own, more recent work explores sculpting forms with living mycelium, and bio-sonification. My fascination with mycelium (the root structure of mushrooms) is compounded by a number of factors: fungi are neither plant nor animal and fungi can clean up ecological disasters.

Creating immersive environments, unnatural History Dioramas, and performative, wearable structures. My one of a kind ‘jewelry’  often serve as maquettes and experiments towards larger sculptural work.

If we can say that the world of science is synonymous with truth and the world of art with that of fiction, I want to tread a middle ground that is unusual and seemingly beyond belief, yet also familiar.

Toronto studio: www.nanopod.tv

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/nanotopia

Mycelium Network Podcast: https://goo.gl/95PdBe

 

Tosca Hidalgo y Terán

b. San Francisco, California

Lived in New Mexico for 13 years before migrating to Toronto, Ontario in 2001.

Resident Canadian since 2011

 

 

Concerning my personal studio space on Harbord Street since August 2005.

My studio practice, and my studio in Toronto- nanopod: Hybrid Studio has always been dedicated to research, and my love of science: Astronomy, biology (marine, fungi/mycology, bacteria, bio-hacking), microscopy, geography- to name a few of my interests!
After the Fukushima disaster, my focus started shifted from making ‘jewelry’ or wearable metal art and flame-working glass to researching new {bio} materials I might work with and learn from that are not harmful to our shared environment, use less energy or give back energy.  
Initially, I participated in workshops that taught Japanese techniques of working with paper (turning it into threads or yarn and/or waterproofing washi), clay. I then dove into researching Obvara (because- yeast glaze!) to growing gourmet mushrooms and using the mycelium blocks to sculpt with (’11-present)!    
Sound art has been a serious interest of mine since putting together mix-tapes in grade school (Gen X, babies!), recording my friend’s voices, field recordings to building circuits that go beep (until I figured out how to make these circuits do more than just that!).
 I now combine my love of ‘found’ sounds and mycology.  So, my focus seriously zeroed in on working with non-human organisms, listening to them (if you will) mid-2016 and this focus has snowballed.  I find myself referred to as an Eco-Feminist, and this stokes my myco-muse!
I am forever grateful for all of the support nanopod studio received as a goldsmith and silversmith studio school and the love received as a glass studio and school.
Now I feel the time has come to move deeper into my work with sound, mycelium towards bio-remediation and giving back to the planet and its inhabitants in a more material friendly manner.
nanopod will remain up throughout 2019, Metal + Glass workshop offerings will start to wain as nanopod: Hybrid Studio metamorphs into its new form through co:Lab|nanopod studio and MycoMechanics!
Love always, Tosca