ENG | ESP
Statement In these last years, I have been developing an approach to art practice managing to propose both an intuitive and rigorous work that stems from a close relationship between culture and nature. I have interest in allowing the work to involve and invite both chance and conditions beyond my control. The process often derives from rethinking the origin and purpose of each and every object by putting it in contact, not only with certain episodes, but as well as with the thousands of years that are part of its genesis. The motives and materials become matter and its decomposition, in an understanding of the world that doesn’t confront it nor imposes itself on its rhythm. These natural cycles are visible in works that gather and dissipate materials that have accompanied my research, superseding the simple act of exposing and instead proposing a continuous action that is inseparable from days passing by. Most works depart from a balance between culture and nature, arising from an academic organization indebt to drawing as a discipline; the work developing into a diversity of mediums, mediations and revisions where I can engender other ways of reasoning that scientific logic doesn’t provide. Following on from my research on drawing as a practice —which I dedicated myself to during my academic course— I’ve progressively interpreted the classical subject of Landscape in a self-developed vision, blending it with methods embedded in a distinct notion of tradition and its rituality and the relations thereof, be it dichotomic, of extension, of integration or complementarity; approaching to drawing as a conceptual and integrative tool, giving shape to an expanded notion of object and space. The two strands of my practice, between studio-based and fieldwork, have provided my work with a very specific language, that manages to capture a tension between daily life and environment, my actions embedded within. Therefore, it doesn´t matter if time folds on itself or if it just repeats its movement over and over again. The recurrence of certain gestures is there, first of all, to prepare and give way to an event, as with the matcha tea ceremony, that is closely linked to my working process. Making the work itself is just a standing point, a dissolving and ever changing space between art and everyday life. |
Trip
Chair
Exhibition
Interview
Joana,
We’d like to ask you a few things about your work... The way we look at a work depends a lot on the reason the work was made. Do you think an explanation is needed prior to seeing your work or do you think everything needed to understand and it or sence it is in the work itself ? We got used to have rational explanations for everything, as if with every step we would need a logical reason for it to happen. We feel lost without these sometimes. Indeed, there could be an explanation for everything, for every gesture or action. We can always find ways of rationalising… I don’t find the need for discursive explanations although I believe speech is very important. For me, discourse needs to be valid in itself and shouldn’t be used as a simple solution to the problem of communicating what exactly you are faced with. So my way of seeing or observing is connected to what I do, but has no connection to the ‘why’. To me, it seems the answer to the ‘why’ is before words, and so, before thoughts. When it reaches the shape of a thought we are already talking about something else. By this stage, it could be anything, but I’m not completely positive if it still is what I did. What I did, the gesture or the process comes from an emptiness of thoughts, which includes getting lost in its own freedom. The answer to ‘why’ is before language, it was a wind that came and made things go together. The nature of things seems an important concern in your work, you manipulate mateials minimally, almost leaving things to make themselves. What kind of relation do you have with the materials you choose for your work. I follow some clues from nature to understand what can be made. I follow colours, textures, how the shape of things fit in the shape of my hands, dimensions, forms, energies and so on… But the most important thing is, in short, the possibility of a material that allows me to lose the notion of time, the timeframe of things. I look for what seems unfinished or is in movement; a material that can exist in any time or place, somehow with no limits… I see materials for my work in most things, from bits of soil to rain drops. I like to take care of them, keep them going or allow them to transform with the passage of time. In the case of what I presented here in the Halfhouse, taking care of the chair became evident and made me sought someone who could help me do it, a carpenter that knows how wood works. And while he started sanding it, I started taking up embroidery lessons with the Catalonian Maria Dolores. My work started with travelling here, flowers and dirt I collected, drawings… Some of these things ephemeral, and evolved into asking each of these persons with a different know-how to teach me what they know, to use my hands as they would use theirs. And in the process of doing it, allowing time (not only the time of doing but also the time of their learning, of their predecessors) to seep in. You work recalls in many ways the zen sensibility or the dry gardens in Tokyo, What importance does this philosophy have for you? I end up going back to it regularly, but more than the gardens or landscaping there are other gestures that interest me more such as the tea ceremony, which always goes together with zen practice or philosophy. It’s the contemplation, first of all! And more than the spaces it has to do with how it takes place. The cycles and the way they inform rituals, the lack of need for explanations and the expanding of time, of losing time… Contemplating, or more accurately, constructing for contemplation. The objects I usually show arise from such construction, not as a result or by-product but in itself. For example, that chair of yours I got restored needed its wood to be taken care of just like the sand in a dry garden would need to be maintained. Objects or materials they have been here long before me and will most likely outlive me, and I’m only tending to them while I’m around. This is why I use pre-existing materials/objects so many times. Do you see your work as something contemplative or as the result of an action? I can’t see it separately. As we say in Portuguese: “é uma pescadinha de rabo na boca”, which relates to a certain traditional dish and I cannot translate it well. The expression is widely used in Portuguese culture, and it’s a good example of how gastronomy and the way of life fold back into each other. It means, in itself, that things are entangled and form ellipses, circles, which we can also say about culture and nature! It is neither something only contemplative nor only the result of a previous gesture. The whole process has to do with doing something that has to be done, and then organising it through forms. |