TRILOGY OF WATER is a group of poetic expressions in my artistic practice. Waves, Corals, and Deep Sea are pieces in which memories of water appear through the senses and sensors of my body. The three works give raise to a milieu of relations among various artistic resources, learnings, and experiences. They are a triad of inflections that have strengthen bonds after my participation in OCEAN/UNI, especially through the study of Astrida Neimanis’ ideas.
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Waves is a narrative of ties in a sequence of drawings that picture some immaterial flux. These interconnected images resemble a biological creation that eventually, generates seashells_ the final painted image in the 9-meter-long paper used for this work.
Unrolling part of the paper each day turned Waves into a journal of the artistic residency period I spent in Lisbon_ where it was made. The movements of the body in the wavelength paper felt as if I have been hit by waves of memories, one after the other. The intensities of the crest and
trough were remembered in the installation of the work with my desk and chair, which explored the ideas of continuity and circularity.
Crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Brazil was an invitation to me to reconnect with my roots in the Iberian Peninsula. The inverted journey, made a century before by the great-grand-women of my family, was in my memory as a sense of direction I needed to acknowledge.
These feminine stories with water constructed tales of care and kinship that I translated as drawing and movement investigations in Waves. Handicraft tools, such as wool yarns and knitting needles, were recalled to my mind and body, and they were amalgamed with other images of symbiotic cycles, algae, laces, and shells_ elements that are intertwined in the conception of a new world.
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Corals is a collection of marine-like-creatures made in cold ceramics. They started as negative models of surfaces on which the molding clay was pressured against. Touching the ‘skin’ of women’s hand-knitted cloth, or the architecture of the city, and even objects in my studio, meant to establish relationship with memory and ancestral knowledge.
Togetherness is a base concept in Corals. When the investigation is close to memorabilia and geographies of ancestry, the final objects resemble fossils; not only because of their morphology but also because of the ‘presence’ of the element they recall in the void. It’s a combination of lived times that interests me as a residue of a flux that I want to learn from.
In later works, clay is shaped by hand but not on top of surfaces anymore. As the artistic objects become more autonomous, other issues I am interested in are added to this marine-like ecology. ‘Epiphytes’ originated from my research of social friendly plants that just live together for company, without being parasites. ‘Listeners’ embodies the desire to listen and learn from
what is unknown about the sea and ecological knowledges. ‘Auga’ is my poetic coral texture, made of small parts combined for the construction of a new form_ named after the word ‘water’ in the Mirandese language of the border between Portugal and Spain.
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Deep Sea is a performative video as well as an object activation experience. It gives light to my tentative trials to interact with the unknown_ in this case, my fabricated creatures, and other objects in my studio. In the dark of the night, lit by the vague reflection of an analog OHP (overhead projector), Deep Sea is a metaphor of the depth of the ocean.
Under the light, objects become protagonists of untold stories that can only be discovered through the lenses of the OHP. The device becomes a magnifier of new ways the work can explore, and it is used as a main source of investigation. As a mediator of realities, the OHP makes light and shadow, negative and positive models, and other binomials, objects of study and relation. In this sense, the studio becomes a laboratory for deep dives in the dark.
In the video, the speculations about ancestral knowledge flow and the connection with other lives on earth, such as, roots of certain plants, are questioned through the encounter of my body in the scene with the creatures projected.
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Renata Pelegrini is a Brazilian artist who has lived in the USA and Europe, and now is based in São Paulo. She joined TBA21-Academy OCEAN/ UNI in 2020. Using an investigative approach that combines different art resources, science interests and personal experience, she develops her art expression in a hybrid way as the processes unfold. Having Language Teaching and Education degrees from the University of São Paulo as her first training, she has worked around layers of communication for years. When Renata gained her diploma in Fine Arts, affinity between humans and non-humans became an interest that has deepened after her artistic residency at Hangar Lisboa in 2018.