The transcultural Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector described writing as “miraculous fishing”, using the “word as bait,” casting for “something beyond the word”, for meaning “between the lines” that then “assimilates the word”. In reflexive chronicles tensed between documentary retrospection and digressive rumination, she also points out the paradoxes that “writing often means remembering what has never existed” and that the writer’s digressive dissembling may discover “brutal truths.” I hope the lines I cast as scholarly and creative writer have such a slant; likewise, the lines I sketch and sculpt.
My visual art, like her verbal art, is caught between cultures and tangled in past present. Though some of my cultural moorings are in modern Brazil, my point of departure is Lisbon, towns along the trainline stretching to the mouth of the Tagus, and fishing ports on Portugal’s vicentine coast. My first artistic references stretch back through the public squares and shantytowns, graffiti and posters of the post-revolutionary Portugal of my childhood, with Salazarist modernist monuments punctuating a ubiquitous Manueline Baroque colonial architecture (marked by global artistic influences, exploited styles and expropriated works that enriched my education creatively, informed it critically), in a palimpsest landscape overwriting layered traces of medieval, moorish, roman, celtic imaginaries. I have spent much of a lifetime studying in other sites (engaging with classical, rennaissance, modern, contemporary art around the Mediterranean, in northern and eastern Europe and Russia, the US, Lusofone Africa) and returning again to these spaces.
I sink my charcoal and oil lines, sculptural hooks baited with found fragments, made of welded steel and cast bronze, along invisible portulan-like networks of intercultural memory, navigating transatlantic cultural tides. Aside from occasional commissioned work and my constant studies (color studies, figure sketches, play with architectural and abstract forms in my sketchbooks), my sketches and sculpture try to draw traces of sunken cultural imaginaries to the surface, to net sense from migrating shoals of cultural symbols, to sustain me (and I hope others at sea). They accrue as ballast in the hold of an art archive/ark, as I attempt to critically and creatively remap and reorient my own cultural consciousness and conscience. Like my scholarly work, my art work aims for a humane and humanizing, critical and creative attentiveness and insight informed by displacement, defamiliarization, deterritorialization of discourses, and dialogue. My art tries to find sense in a sort of space on the margins and between searching lines, through figures tensed within frameworks constructed from symbolic abstraction and material traces, objects reframed as landscapes and abstracted color studies, landscapes and bodies reimagined as memory maps, mixed media (oil and charcoal, wood and wax, welded metal and stretched painted or imprinted cloth, wire and found objects).
Several of my current lines of sketches, sculpture, and photography cast for a cultural compass using fish and birds as subject or bait: critically documenting and creatively depicting a fishing industry and fish in a Portuguese cultural imaginary confronting climate change, global capitalist markets, and troubling colonial memory and waves of post-colonial nostalgia; focused on migrations and scavenging with birds (storks in the Alentejo, various migrating seabirds, also urban sawllows, coastal swifts, sanderlings, sandpipers). Other lines of my work cast for sense by retracing scars, reconfiguring memory as living map drawn on the body, recovering discarded and disregarded fragments, reframing landscapes and lives lived within them. I care deeply about form and frame, creative and critical framework, line, color, texture, material, always the subject and site, story and history inseparable from the way we tell, touch, see it.
What might be framed as a realist strain in my work includes documentary photographs taken in Portugal, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States, as well as pencil and watercolor portraits, more gestural charcoal and clay or bronze cast figure sketches. My figurative oil and charcoal sketches as well as sculpture draw on continuous figure drawing sessions and stacks of sketchbooks that are my way of seeing on the road, but also on my own photographs, archival photographs, propaganda, as well as scholarly study of literature, cinema, art, architecture, cartography, etc. Some of my photographs reframe fish as markers of cultural memory but also as current way of reckoning with climate and market shifts, a manifestation of various currents in cultural consciousness. The boy I sketched fishing on the Aveiro shore struggles in clay and bronze with an imaginary sea monster modeled after a fish on a dry fountain. My Portulan map, in bronze, exposes the coin as compass and explores the ways in which colonialism resurfaces on the contorted geo-cultural body. It remembers colonial occupations in terms of continental bones and bodies, female, considering cultural violations. It also retraces the routes of four generations of transcontinental migrant/immigrant women in my family. With the fishmonger photographed holding her glasses and old women drawn in conversation, I aim for intimate glimpses of impenetrable subjects, whose lives extend within and beyond site and sight, who seem to be telling stories that we can understand only in terms of silences. Yet all of these realist works also strains towards the abstraction more evident in my conceptual oil and charcoal sketches. I see my figures framed by abstraction and my abstract works that cannot be figured out as akin to my documentary work, insofar as they document the lines and tensions, shapes and colors of a struggle (my own and others’) with a post-colonial cultural imaginary. I mean to weave lines with which which story and history, fiction and documentary, critical and creative work in verbal and visual arts cast for understanding into a wide net with a transcultural reach, more effective at letting fish through to live, strong enough to hold a sustaining and sustainable catch.