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.

April

Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) April 13, 2024.

April

 Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) April 13, 2024.

April

"When you tape into the arts to foster a meditative state, the places in your brain responsible for judgment and personal criticism are quieted in your prefrontal cortex, and you can assess a more generous, perspective-taking point of view." Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross (2023). Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. Obra de Cruz-Filipe. Exposição Modo de Ver na Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. 

sugar and oxygen

"Carbon dioxide plus water combined in the presence of light and chlorophyl in the beautiful membrane-bound machinery of life yields sugar and oxygen." Robin Wall Kimerer (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 2024.

March

O tempo oferece palcos onde vamos esculpindo vidas. A nossa e a de outros seres que se entrelaçam na nossa. O tempo, esse grande escultor, de Marguerite Yourcenar. No das plantas e no meu, recomeça um novo ciclo. Juntas, vamos esculpindo o tempo. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 2024.

March

How can we go on living our lives when people of war keep annihilating lives around the world? How can we devise a prosperous future for anyone or any country, when we can´t even guaranty the basic conditions of peace, shelter and food for life to happen? How can we allow that money and precious resources are allocated to destruction, instead of construction? What does our silence reveal in the face of all the monstrosities going on? How can we not enrage with the ineptitude of all the institutions that where supposed to avoid the suffering worldwide? When did we get so numbed that we can pretend that's not our problem? What does it take us to realize that if someone is left to destroy others they can destroy us? How can we keep on participating in the web of life if the ones in power are destroying our chances of future? When is enough enough? How much longer for the day when we all decide united, regardless of our nationalities and places of birth, that there is no place for war? No place for machines of war. No place for economies of war. No place for men of war. Maybe it's time. May we build a prosperous future for all and not for some, fostering prosperity for all and displacing greed. Rebuilding what was destroyed, healing wounded and land so we can heal ourselves. May the war be over! 

War is Over poster in English, image: CC BY-NC 2.0 by Yoko Ono official.

February

"What if we could fashion a restoration plan that grew from understanding multiple meanings of land? Land as sustainer. Land as identity. Land as grocery store and pharmacy. Land as connection to our ancestors. Land as moral obligation. Land as sacred. Land as self. (..) Land as home." Robin Wall Kimerer (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. 

Weaving roots to a better world. Photo of tapestry (86 x 78 cm) by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 2024.

February

"Beauty is not only formal, and lies not only in the superficial qualities that are appealing to the eye or ear, it lies in patterns of meaning, in evocations of values, and its connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see." Rebecca Solnit (2022). Orwell's Roses. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 2024.

February

"We know that loving a person has agency and power - we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart." Robin Wall Kimerer (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Photo by Monica Pinheiro. Free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

February

“Imperfect they may be, but I believe they are a beginning of a reweaving of the bond between people and the land. (…) I can take the buried stone from my heart and plant it here, restoring land, restoring culture, restoring myself.” Robin Wall Kimerer (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 2024.

January

"Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It's what happens that matters. (...) If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. (...) And we think of it as simply time, as if it where a thing, as if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story." Robin Wall Kimerer (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC), taken January 21, 2024.

January

“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.” Robin Wall Kimerer (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. 

One month into winter (January 27), this black locust tree shows Spring time. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC), taken January 27, 2024. 

Solstice

Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC), taken November 7, 2023.

cooperation

“In fighting against resistance, we will become more focused on getting rid of the problem than on understanding what it is; by contrast, when working with resistance we want to suspend frustration at being blocked, and instead engage with the problem in its own right”. Richard Sennett (2013). Together. The Rituals, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

unselfing

"Observing something beautiful" is "an occasion for unselfing" and it "may well hold the key to our collective survival. Because it means that our role here on earth is not simply to maximize the advantage in our lives (...). It's to maximize (protect, regenerate) all life. We are here not just to make sure we as individuals survive, but to make sure that life survives. (...) We must attempt, with great urgency, to imagine a world that does not require Shadow Lands, that is not predicated on sacrificial people and sacrificial ecologies and sacrificial continents. More than imagine it, we must begin, at once, to build it." Naomi Klein (2023). Doppelganger. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

Human rights

«(...) words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation, a crash connected, in ways we have barely begun to understand, to the torrent of words in which we are swimming (...). I appreciated Greta's "Blah, blah, blah" speeches because they precisely captured the pervasive feeling of speechlessness, far better than my own impotent and sullen silences in this period.» Naomi Klein (2023). Doppelganger. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

November

"(...) metamorphosis occurs when two or more unlike elements are joined (...). Here the craftsman has consciously to decide if the combination will best work like a compound, in which the whole becomes different than its parts, or like a mixture, in which the elements continue an independent coexistence." Richard Sennett (2009). The Craftsman. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

Less machines

While reading about the «Workshop in Rotterdam: How to Build a Bike Generator», discovered the larger solution scenarios for human powered societies, that tackle much more then climate crises and fossil consumption. They present integrated solutions to increase biodiversity, reduce city concentration, production near place of consumption, better health, sustainable farming, better soils and food, more wellbeing. All of that with less machines and more human power, as envisioned in the Human Power Plant. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

October

"If we had 30 days to save the world, would we act before the 29th?" Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

September

"For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth." Virginia Wolf (1930) in The Essays of Virginia Wolf: volume IX. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

Setembro

"Feeling the touch, discovering the colour, memorizing the smell. Weaving quietly different textures and tensions. Creating peace to guide action. Liberating the mind to shape possibilities." June 2021, What can we do with what we already have?...

Photos by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

September

"The demand for urban nature-based solutions can be expected to rise exponentially, as greening cities is the best measure to address the accelerating urban heat island effect". European Investment Bank, Hudson, G., Hart, S., Verbeek, A. (2023). Investing in nature-based solutions – State-of-play and way forward for public and private financial measures in Europe.

Photo: Temperate part of, probably, the smallest garden in the city. Taken in august 2023 by Monica Pinheiro. Free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

September

"Space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning." Yi-Fu Tuan (2005). Space and Place. The perspective of experience. Photo taken in July by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

September

"Build a life that you don't need to escape from." "If true peace and clarity are what you seek in this life (...) know that you will find them nearby and not faraway". Ryan Holiday (2019). Stillness is Key.

 

Photo: Probably the smallest garden in the city: tropical part. Taken in august 2023 by Monica Pinheiro. Free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

July

How strange that people who try to protect the Planet are called «activists» or «rebels», instead of «protectors» or «carers». Even stranger is that people who deliberately destroy the Planet are called «businessman» instead of «mass murders» or «planetary destroyers». 

Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

July

Made by Mother Earth and Father Time, and Love. Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

July

"Particular attention should be paid to the material used, for good craftsmanship is built on natural foundations, and nature assures the material's quality. (...) When a certain locality is rich in a certain raw material, that material gives rise to a certain craftware. It is this resources, the gift of nature, that are the veritable mother of craftwork." Soetsu Yanagi (2018). The Beauty of Everyday Things.  

Photos by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

July

"When you can see yourself from outside, you contemplate existence with more humility and perceptiveness than when (...) you imagined yourself as the best self, your city as the best city, and what you called life as the only conceivable life." Rafael Argullol cited by Irene Vallejo (2022). Papyrus: the invention of books in the ancient world. Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

July

"It's a strange sort of pain. (...) To die of yearning for something you'll never experience." by Alessandro Baricco (1997). Silk. Painting: gouache and watercolour. June, 2023.

nearness, seasonality and sustainability

The plants used in my tapestries come from my little garden, are gathered during my walks, or collected during visits to friends and family homes. Some are used right after collection in order to maintain enough elasticity to be worked out. Others are used dried because they offer great flexibility or because they gain other affordances with time. 

Seasonality plays a special role in my tapestries. Not only because plants availability vary according to each month, but also because I like to use daylight when I make them. Each tapestry has the plants of the season and corresponding availability, embedded. If you observe attentively you can guess the seasons they crossed until closure. 

I like to think in sustainability like a verb. The process of discovering ways of make things with what is available. Weaving them into being otherness. Like plants that are considered «invasive». I find it a lack of imagination. A strange classification for bio materials that can thrive in desolate places. Surviving by themselves, without any kind of input or demand on our part, and with their qualities can be transformed in so many beautiful or useful things. 

Weaving the tapestries is a way of giving body (and soul) to my living framework of doing what I know, the best I can, with what I have, wherever I am.

Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

navetes

Navete ou lançadeira. Portuguese words used for shuttle. "A shuttle is a tool designed to neatly and compactly store a holder that carries the thread of the weft yarn while weaving with a loom. Shuttles are thrown or passed back and forth through the shed, between the yarn threads of the warp in order to weave in the weft. The simplest shuttles, known as "stick shuttles", are made from a flat, narrow piece of wood with notches on the ends to hold the weft yarn" ( Wikipedia ). 

In my tapestries I use repurposed ice cream sticks for the wool or cotton parts. For the plant parts it´s hands work, our best tool. Also in the photo, you can see two handmade wood needles, seldom used, but useful when needed more precision work.

Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

June

June 18, 2023. Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

June

June 10, 2023. Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

June

June 20, 2023. Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

June

"Women have been the weavers of tales and tapestries. For centuries, they have unspooled their stories as they spun or threw the shuttle on their loom. They were the first to capture de universe as warp and weft. They knotted together their joys, hopes, sorrows, fears, and most private beliefs. (...) They interlaced verbs, yarn, adjectives, and silk. This is why text and textile share so many words (...)." Irene Vallejo (2022). Papyrus: the invention of books in the ancient world. 

Photo of tapestry (78 x 96 cm) by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).