Texts

Artist Statement

Collecting stories

I finished my degree in Painting in 2005 in the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. Since then I have always sought more knowledge through contact with people, by communicating with different cultures.

Moreover, it as a traveller that I started my diary collections, diaries that now I consider the basis of my entire body of work.

In my work, I collect memories, stories and hours, drawing obsessively and anxiously looking for new images.

My intention is to tell stories of time and memory through the objects that I create.

The waiting time is also the time in which we revisit memories, it is during that time that I start to develop drafts, which then I turn into large drawings and installations.

While recovering scribbles from my childhood I create an amalgamation with the forms I find in Nature.

Drawing can happen through the black line that comes out of my pen, but also through the wires that say words from my mouth, describing mountains and landscapes.

To climb a mountain and make a drawing, saving in my notebook the time it took to do this drawing. To Split trunks and paint their entrails, not with blooded red but with charcoal black. Anticipating their last state, before the matter is consumed by the flames and becomes part of the Earth again.

To sew words one by one stitching fabric and wood, to let them drain from the wall to the floor as drops falling from my mouth to the floor. Sensing landscapes, pre feeling the World!

About the exhibition

'A Palavra fala uma língua que não é sua' 

I write this text from memory. I do not have the split trunks, the tainted toilet rolls, the piles of straw, the stained boards, threads that transform in curtains in curtains in front of me. Only the memory of the subtle and delicate transformation of materials. I think about the effort to perform these transformations, but more in terms of the necessary continuity to shape something, to grow, acquire memories, scribbles, markings.

From my table I could see fissures found in split trunks being mended with black paint. Under that layer, the uncertainty about what was there, started taking place. The careful selection and transformation of materials, would rapidly arise as a gesture of deliberate occultation and closure. The more I think of that occultation, the more it challenges me, just like a shadow, mysteriously projecting itself in the bedroom wall and does not let us sleep. The organic matter suffocated, marked by paint or deliberate cuttings, will not let us sleep.

What is this revelation offered by the occultation? It is the revelation of a strenuous life, the long strife all beings and things must go through - wouldn’t randomness be enough? Will this tension, within the despairing occultation, only be explained by such an elementary thing that we think of it as occult? Or rather a hymn to women’s solitude, to the heaping piles of threads, in the story of their silence and despair, weaving the light but resistant curtains hiding their weight in the world?

Not even the materials gathered in succession, accumulation or sewing will be worth in terms of safety and fortress. They are there, carefully drawn to remind us of partings, of the tenderness of the weaving and its resistance, turning their weakness into strength. All this work is a story on how mysterious resistance is and on how nothing in it is immediately perceived or can be saved by memory. All depends on the smallest and most secret step towards a continued existence.

André Alves

‘The pleasure of translation is a gain, when associated to the loss of linguistic absoluteness, accepts the difference between adequacy and equivalence, the equivalence without adequacy.’

Paul Ricouer, "On Translation"

The word exists within itself. It has a name so that it can have a meaning, which exists only in the exercise of its use. The meaning is the use, the use is the meaning.

Within the word, it speaks for itself. Whispers, confides and we may suppose it giggles, laughs, shouts, startled in an everlasting murmur. I always mistrust a quiet word, the silence is a hidden turmoil. Words exist and speak within themselves, because we speak and exist within ourselves, before we are and exist outside ourselves. Hard (if not truly useless) is to know how to distinguish the beginning and end of each of these natures.

To words (and things), factuality is irrelevant. The truth is a provisional state between the ignorance of today and tomorrow. Wisdom is a speculation exercise.

I know - because I read it - that word comes from Latin parabola. And to know of this is to know nothing without unfolding memory to attribute a meaning - by intuition - to a term of a language I don’t know.

It doesn’t matter, here where I write, in which language the word corresponds to. The word speaks beyond whatever I write. My hands and this pen make and draw things that have an outline, a shape, a sound and each outline, shape and sound are already other words that also have an outline, shape and sound. And thereafter infinitely. And when words of this language would be finished, we would have all the other languages. And when all languages were finished we would have the entire Speech.

I know - because I imagined and confirmed, reading - that to the Latin word parabola also corresponds parable.

Word and parable are not adequate translations in either meaning or use. But there is little you can comment on this type of correspondence.

I am interested in the inappropriate equivalence that the wish of meaning and use - for these words, drawings and outlines - built.

Parable - coming from Latin parabola, just like word - is at the same time, an allegoric narrative, a comparison developed in a small tale, in which is hold a true, a teaching, and in trigonometry, a quadratic function, translated by a flat curve which points are equally distanced from a fixed point and a fixed straight line.

The pleasure is in understanding - translating facts in experience, or phenomena - that what I have just finished writing/describing are rituals of remembrance that surpass time (the stories) and the drawing of a mountain (the quadratic function).

May that be what word means.

Cláudia Lopes

Patricia arrives the atelier and after a good laugh and chit-chat, she starts unfurling an industrial thread bobbin and rolling it again around a painting. She does this for some hours, days, metre by metre in a repetitive dance, almost tantric, as if that marathon could also free the utilitarian weight of the objects she brings for her production. She reorganizes all that thread in layers and displays it as a silent curtain embalmed by the wind.

There seems to be some attempt to install order and silence in Patricia’s work, of organic manipulation, and the results present almost always in dichotomy. The potentially revealing fissures of the bay tree trunks are painted black and that darkness is contrasting with the white and lightness of the olive trees. There are curves and ancestral voices in each crack, but it is the straightness and silence who reign in the thread panels. There is a roof that does not cover a house nor anyone, even if countless stories are hosted in the cotton skeins.

The intuitional landscape is almost always the Mountain. But before or after the mountains there is the city, the atelier or the museum. Patricia brings and takes, laughs and cries. She is mesmerised with chaos, while organizing the randomness geometrically.

Sometimes I offer my help in the dance with the thread bobbins, but only she knows how to teach them the waltz.

Maria Sottomayor