Alba Lab is the name Alba gives to her life experiment: a way of exploring transformation, the right to choose, and what she calls the universal language of art and signs. The drawings are its notebook.
Graphite first
The forms found in the coffee grounds are drawn first in graphite. This stage carries most of the structure: the outlines, the cross hatching, the rows of small circles and beads that run through many of her works. On Instagram she often posts the graphite sheet beside the finished one, so you can see how much of the drawing is already there before any colour.
Then colour, pencil by pencil
Colour arrives slowly, in coloured pencil laid over the graphite. Some works stay almost monochrome, like Without Ego, drawn in red pencil only. Others fill the sheet with blue, gold and violet, like Mind Moves and Correlation.
In several of her process photos a golden feather quill lies across the paper. It appears in her photographic series Iniciation too, held up against a white curtain.
Signed with a date
Every finished sheet carries her signature and the date it was finished, written as day, month and year. On the drawings you can find small numbers such as 050724 beside the name Alba. Prints reproduce that signature and date as part of the image, and each print is signed again by hand.
Collect, choose, connect
Alongside the drawings, Alba works on what she calls the Transparent Happy Soul Formula, shared one piece at a time. Its three steps, collect, choose and connect, appear in her photographs of rows of small pictures laid out on the floor. The drawings and the formula grew from the same restart, and both are still unfolding.
