creation at the core of art-I-fact

The beginning of a new tapestry starts long before I lay out the threads on the frame. Each tapestry starts as a synapse that survived in my brain. With time it weaves together with other synapses, creating a visual memory that grows and evolves, reinforcing some features and letting go others. This visual memory mixes with previous experiences, narratives of people, new and old books, and life’s events at the gestating stage. Then, the image of possibilities for the next work meets with the material affordances of all the resources collected. Materiality that will give substance to daydream explorations, until the dialogue between mind, hands, vision, and materials becomes irresistible and the fragrances fill the room with the materialization of a new art-I-fact. From stillness to flow. Hatched from a resilient synapse that joined with others. Creation at the core. Flourishing by coming into being. 

Photo of tapestry (83  x 78 cm) by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 2024.

February

"It was so long ago that my mind softens even the sharpest features, melting memories into liquid pain. (...) It's odd how faces, solid and visible as they are, evaporate, while words, made of breath, stay." Elif Shafak, 2014. The Architect's Apprentice. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

May

"Photographs were useful, but somehow always confirmed the memory rather than liberating it." Julian Barnes, 2018, The only story. May 15, 2018. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

smoothly overlaying

"(...) there are memories that seem to run like a film, smoothly overlaying all the others, that have such shape and form that you suspect that they are inventions and may have created themselves, and within them your own identity even begins to slide and fade, and is liable to change as in a dream." Georgina Harding, 2009, The spy game. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

storing artefacts

[Image by Rusty Orr, Egyptian hieroglyphs, a low-density, long-lifetime storage medium, courtesy of the author and Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley.]

Note to self: see rumblings in notebook (June 3rd, 2009) and paper with artefact expected to extend the lifetime and density of bit storage for large archives ("density as high as 1012 bits/in2, and thermodynamic stability in excess of one billion years." p. 1835) and how technological artefacts narrate human mobility, in this case storage artefacts.

Begtrup, G. E., Gannett, W., Yuzvinsky, T. D., Crespi, V. H., and Zettl, A. (2009). Nanoscale reversible mass transport for archival memory. Nano Letters, 9(5):1835-1838.