BOUND BY WATER
by
Aldara Ortega
Bound by Water / Atadas entre Aguas is a series by Spanish-born artist Aldara Ortega, created during the summer of 2024 in Ibiza. Drawing from her Spanish roots and a lifelong passion for dance, Ortega weaves vivid red fabric, rope, and the fluidity of water to explore the profound tension between freedom and constraint. The series integrates the intricate beauty of Shibari, the Japanese art of rope binding, into a visual narrative that pays homage to the rhythms of Spanish dance, creating a cultural dialogue where the interplay of tension and fluidity mirrors the movement of dance.
Artist StatementThe series began as a tribute to dance. I was staying in Ibiza with women who shared a deep passion for performance art, and we had been talking about collaborating for months. We had beautiful fabric fans that would open underwater like wings, a visual metaphor for freedom and expression. But as water often does, it worked in unexpected ways. On our first immersion, the fans disintegrated. Pulling the fabric from the fan structure, we wrapped it around their bodies to keep the Spanish dance narrative alive, but my muses felt exhausted, cold, and frustrated. We almost stopped right there. That evening, a contemporary rope artist, @JulianTies, performing at our private residence suggested Shibari. I hesitated, but we tried it.
When I saw the first images of the women tied underwater, my reaction was complicated. I knew rope on a woman's body carries loaded history. But when I looked at the images, I saw something else entirely: connection instead of restraint. Trust instead of submission. We kept going. I watched their bodies move through resistance into surrender, fighting the cold and the rope at first, then embracing the moment. When we surfaced, we knew we had created something true. Raw, elegant, and pure.
Working underwater, the muse and I hold our breath simultaneously, submerged in an environment where visibility is limited, the body becomes physically exhausted, and water invades every space. Each session requires complete trust. I focus entirely on my subjects and their emotions, their presence, their bodies, their surrender. That is what lives in the frame.
In this series, two women descend beneath the surface, bound together by Shibari rope. Drawing from my freediving practice, where presence and surrender allow the body to flow effortlessly, the work explores how constraint and trust can create transcendence. The red fabric echoes flamenco's passion and ritual. The rope creates tension while the water offers weightlessness, simultaneous restraint and release. Together they hold a space where opposing forces do not cancel each other out but coexist.
The ropes bind the body, but the water, with its sensation of weightlessness, feels liberating. Both happening in the same moment, pulling you into a heightened state of awareness. That paradox is the heart of the series.
These images are conceptual self-portraits, even when another woman's body is before my lens. We create them together, a meditation on what it means to inhabit a female body in relation to another, and on the full spectrum of what we hold at once: strength and vulnerability, sensuality and power, grace and raw emotion.
Artist StatementThe series began as a tribute to dance. I was staying in Ibiza with women who shared a deep passion for performance art, and we had been talking about collaborating for months. We had beautiful fabric fans that would open underwater like wings, a visual metaphor for freedom and expression. But as water often does, it worked in unexpected ways. On our first immersion, the fans disintegrated. Pulling the fabric from the fan structure, we wrapped it around their bodies to keep the Spanish dance narrative alive, but my muses felt exhausted, cold, and frustrated. We almost stopped right there. That evening, a contemporary rope artist, @JulianTies, performing at our private residence suggested Shibari. I hesitated, but we tried it.
When I saw the first images of the women tied underwater, my reaction was complicated. I knew rope on a woman's body carries loaded history. But when I looked at the images, I saw something else entirely: connection instead of restraint. Trust instead of submission. We kept going. I watched their bodies move through resistance into surrender, fighting the cold and the rope at first, then embracing the moment. When we surfaced, we knew we had created something true. Raw, elegant, and pure.
Working underwater, the muse and I hold our breath simultaneously, submerged in an environment where visibility is limited, the body becomes physically exhausted, and water invades every space. Each session requires complete trust. I focus entirely on my subjects and their emotions, their presence, their bodies, their surrender. That is what lives in the frame.
In this series, two women descend beneath the surface, bound together by Shibari rope. Drawing from my freediving practice, where presence and surrender allow the body to flow effortlessly, the work explores how constraint and trust can create transcendence. The red fabric echoes flamenco's passion and ritual. The rope creates tension while the water offers weightlessness, simultaneous restraint and release. Together they hold a space where opposing forces do not cancel each other out but coexist.
The ropes bind the body, but the water, with its sensation of weightlessness, feels liberating. Both happening in the same moment, pulling you into a heightened state of awareness. That paradox is the heart of the series.
These images are conceptual self-portraits, even when another woman's body is before my lens. We create them together, a meditation on what it means to inhabit a female body in relation to another, and on the full spectrum of what we hold at once: strength and vulnerability, sensuality and power, grace and raw emotion.