An artist and researcher currently working with ceremonial performances and drawing/mark making, interested in research that deepens our understanding of matter, post-materialism and immateriality.
I am an artist and researcher currently working with ceremonial performances and drawing/mark making. I am a land keeper and my work is inspired by the micro life that I tend to in the soil I am regenerating. I use scientific and spiritual knowledge and practices to explore Donna Haraway's concept of making kin with our natural ecosystems. I have recently introduced musical vibration in my fine art practice and I am interested in research that deepens our understanding of matter, post-materialism and immateriality, and how they relate to one another.
With a degree in Illustration, but with a professional career in arts management and production, it was in 2015 that I resumed my artistic practice. I lived 15 years in the UK, where I worked with Raqib Shaw, Stanza, Alexandra Mir, David Blackmore and paula roush, and with institutions such as the Barbican, Frieze, Tate Liverpool, Oxford Modern, and managed spaces and communities of artists in South and East London for arebyte/arbeit. I also helped to form their Trowbridge Gardens project, a community centre with shared spaces between artists, wellbeing practitioners, for cross-generation knowledge, gardening and community support.
Since I completed my Masters in Book Arts and Fine Art at the University of the Arts London in 2017, I started exhibiting and publishing a body of work that investigates through language, sculpture, print and video, phenomenological proposals on Geology and forwards socio-political commentary. Soon after, I won a bursary for the GreenTech Enterprise Course at the University College London - Institute for Global Prosperity in 2018, and created Matéria Cíclica (Cyclic Matter) in Portugal in 2019, an arts organisation that creates strategies and platforms for a transition to a more ecocentric culture.
This has generated a huge impact in my life and artistic practice: I work with the communities of Peniche and Óbidos’ Municipalities, and my art practice is becoming more participatory and performative, preoccupied with the value of life; grounded in soil and water, this transition has been exacerbated by the work as a land keeper, making the practice more bound to biology, microbiology and performance.
Already in Portugal, I have been shortlisted for the Cine-Eco Seia International Film Festival 2020 and I won a residency bursary at RAMA in Torres Vedras. I am also part of the Guerrilla Gallery run by Emerge in Torres Vedras.
I am also editor-in-chief of The Journal of Arts Writing by Students, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes art writing by MA and PhD students, published by Intellect Ltd. I have been trained by The Publishing Training House in London and as an English Language teacher; I also write in Portuguese at Arte Capital. My writings are broad in content and range from the decentralisation and democratisation of the arts, to the archive and the book as an art form. I am an advocate for arts writing as a vital part of the art practice.