I work with a series of emblematic drawings which are constantly flowing from my hand, initially as doodles, and are then transposed to multiple types of media. These visuals are the key features of my art. They ‘travel’ with me all around as an entourage - and they serve to poetically address different topics, according to the art project I am engaged with.
For this residency at Elsewhere Studios, my wish was to somehow honor the place to where I had been intuitively guided to apply, as well as its history. With that in mind, I had the insight of adding fringes and feather-like elements to my art pieces - in order to allude to the land’s past inhabitants - and I also wanted to combine my own iconography of line drawings with some photographic content related to my life experiences in Paonia – as a way to honor the town, the people who I was about to meet and that ones who were kindly welcoming me.
Thus, I flew from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, carrying a previously ‘fringed’ drawing inside a tube. When unpacking and unrolling the paper sheet at Elsewhere Studios, I realized that the work’s fringes got curled. What a good surprise! (It’s always exciting when non-intentional procedures do work so well). Another curly surprise was that the other two female artists with whom I was going to share the residency were also curly. So, there we were: three shades of curls, around the same age, getting along very well. At the end of the month we had our final open-studio show: ‘CURLHAUS’.
I usually work on different art pieces simultaneously, so by the date of our open studio many of my pieces were in progress. My work’s titles tend to call attention to a dimension that is more intangible and psycho-emotional, while my body of works has a plenty of references to the bird’s universe - both in visual and metaphorical ways.
As I had recently learned the english expression “goose bumps”, I ended up calling my installation ‘GOOSE BUMPS AND OTHER VIBRATORY PATTERNS’. I had occupied Elsewhere´s second floor and there I hanged my new art experiments, with transparent flowy sheets of drawings and dangling feathers. I also worked with images of real birds, cutting color fragments from some postcards that I had received as a gift from travelers (maybe time travelers? :} ) who showed up one day in the yard and told me stories of the time when they used to live in that building, many decades ago. Still working with postcards, I digitally combined my drawings with photographs of the region - presenting the first studies for a future collaborative project with a local photographer. I’ve alluded to the building’s mythology - by drawing my own energy vortexes and vibratory patterns - and I also played with the architecture of my living/working space, making one of the sleeping rooms into a cage - and then ‘pecking’ a gap in the wire mesh. And as a last-minute creation, I made a projection of my own “gateway to elsewhere”.
The symbolism of birds had permeated not only my art but my experience as a whole: I had the honor of being taken to a flight over the canyons, I slid my fledged chest on rippled waters… I hiked through the arid landscapes like a roadrunner…. and, of course, I made my lap into a nest for the cat :} I’ve made a flock of wonderful human friends as well. Together we had burst in shrill laughter, sang beautiful songs, danced silly birdy dances and ate food straight from the gardens. The town is to be congratulated for the music, the art and people´s receptivity. I’m flattered by their competence and commitment to honoring our innate tie to the natural world. By now I’m back in Rio, but my ideas are still sparking, so I wish I can be back soon.
Thank you guys
