2023

The Sequel

MNAC, Lisbon

‘The Sequel’ is made of cotton fabric painted with vegetable and mineral dyes - mulberry leaf extract for the bright light greens and Himalayan rhubarb with iron sulphate for the darker, almost black, greens. Made up of fifteen elements or ‘shovels’, it is configured as a kind of fan on the wall, two meters wide and one meter high. The Sequel was made in response to a work from the Ar.Co collection that Manuel Castro Caldas invited me to choose. It was exhibited at MNAC in 2023 and at Encounter gallery at 2024. My choice was a piece of jewellery by the Dutch jeweller Ruudt Peters. Made from paper and pieces of wood and rubber, the jewellery makes up a kind of umbrella (or small retractable parasol) and of a size that you can carry on your shoulder. This jewel, in turn, was the result of a workshop shared with Ar.Co's jewellery students in 1990. The leitmotif of the workshop was Peter Greenaway's film ‘The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover’. It is from this film that the motifs for ‘The Sequel’ came from - a kind of hand-painted pattern featuring two elements - a plant-like, biomorphic form and another sharp, knife-like, metallic, inert one. These two repeated elements are interspersed in the piece, creating a graphic-chromatic rhythm, which opens up on the wall in the form of a large fan, like the open umbrella that makes up Ruudt Peters' jewel. The exhibition was on show at MNAC from March to the end of May, 2023.