Goodman Gallery
15.03 - 24.04.2024

In her latest solo exhibition, ‘How To Eat The Sun and The Moon’ at Goodman Gallery, Brazillian artist Laura Lima presents large-scale assemblages suspended from the ceiling — wispy cloudscapes spun from folklore. She promises a multisensory experience and hints at a central theme that confronts the vastness of the cosmos.

The title is a playful yet profound provocation.  It hints at Lima’s desire to explore not just the physical world but the spiritual through the very fabric of mythology. She is not content with the ordinary, she hungers for something more philosophical, that dares us to consider how we see ourselves in the universe. 

Drawing inspiration from Brazilian folklore and the vibrant spiritual traditions of her childhood countryside, Lima’s work is visually arresting and teeming with tales, containing passages and woven paths. The work includes tapestries made from raw cotton dyed with pigments from vegetation. The porous and tactile nature of the tapestries invites viewers to become active participants, to move around the gallery space and engage with the dynamic energy she’s created.

The choice to suspend the works on cables creates a sense of levity, augmenting the physicality and auric field of the works while freeing them from the usual ossified plane. This effect prompted me to reach out and touch the work. I  asked if this was allowed, and with a spark of joy in her eyes, Lima answered, “Of course, that’s intentional; I wanted to move away from traditional notions of engaging with artworks and bridge the space between audience and object”. This was a space for communion, a dismantling of the usual sanctioned sterility found in galleries and museums. The artist’s intention seemed to echo the subversive spirit of Tropicália, a Brazilian artistic movement of the 1960s that blended Brazilian rhythms and traditions with psychedelic rock and foreign pop culture, all while challenging the military dictatorship’s control over artistic expression. Here, the preciousness of the object was dissolved, replaced by a playful engagement that invited the viewer into the creative process.   

As I moved through the gallery, the suspended works swayed gently, casting dancing shadows on the floor and walls.  It felt less like a mausoleum for art but a fertile ground for ideas, where exploration and discovery took root — a testament to the enduring legacy of Brazilian artists like Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape (whose work often invited audience interaction) as well as Mira Schendel (whose explorations of language and form challenged traditional artistic boundaries). 

Anhanguá is a name resonating with the whispers of Brazilian folklore. This mythical entity, Anhanguá, dances across regional interpretations – malevolent spirit, guardian of the verdant embrace, or shapeshifter blurring form. The work thrums with a life of its own: a warm ombré tapestry, layers upon layers of cotton threads morphing into waves, eyes forming at the periphery. This composition reinforces the sense of these works as imbued with corporeality, existing not simply as objects but as entities with a presence.

Another work echoing this corporeality is the skeletal tapestry “Matinta Pereira.” – a skeletal crone with untamed hair, draped in shadows or the tattered remnants of a past life.  In Brazilian folk tales Matinta Pereira, the fickle trickster is a malevolent witch, a guardian of the verdant embrace, and a shapeshifter at different turns. Lima’s tapestry thrums with a similar mutability. Warm hues of radiant orange, earthy browns, pastel pinks and vibrant yellows bleed into an abyssal black at the tapestry’s base, perhaps mirroring a descent from to the secrets buried beneath the earth. This chromatic metamorphosis evokes the legend’s core – the ever-present threat of night, the fragility of life before the encroaching darkness, and the fear that courses through the veins as we contemplate our own mortality.

A disquieting sense of metamorphosis clung to each work as though they yearned to shed their static forms and return to some primordial state – a state the artist, perhaps unknowingly, mirrored in her choice of materials. This act, both homage and violation, echoed the exhibition’s theme – a chilling reminder of humans’ fraught connection with the natural world. 

This sense of unease is a recurring theme in Lima’s work. One might recall the unsettling tension in ‘Balé Literal’, an exhibition staged at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2023, where performers’ bodies were pushed to their physical limits through subversion of control; where the rudimentary mechanism and reliance on human energy to move objects challenged the idea of a perfectly controlled performance, instead highlighting the limitations and imperfections of the human body. The line between performance and endurance tests is blurred, leaving the viewer questioning the nature of control and consent. Perhaps these textiles, imbued with the memory of their transformation, were a haunting echo of that performance. Or maybe they whispered of a different kind of transformation, one hinted at in her use of organic materials and living organisms.

In past works, Lima has incorporated elements of decay and the passage of time, suggesting a cyclical process where death and rebirth are intertwined. She asks, “Could these textiles undergo a similar process, a slow metamorphosis towards something new and unknown?”  Like so much in Lima’s work, the answer remains tantalisingly out of reach, leaving the viewer in a space of uncertainty and contemplation. This ambiguity, this resistance to simple interpretation, is a hallmark of Lima’s practice. It reflects a scepticism towards grand narratives and a focus on the in-between spaces, the liminal zones where meaning becomes fluid.  Her textiles embody this perfectly, caught between their raw state and their dyed existence. They are neither fully plant nor fully human creations, existing, instead, in a state of flux.

Ultimately, Lima’s textiles are not simply objects to be admired. They are invitations, prompts to contemplate the complex and ever-shifting relationship between humanity and nature.  They ask us to consider the cost of transformation, the beauty and unease inherent in change, and the possibility that the line between control and collaboration is far more porous than we might imagine. These textiles become a palimpsest, each layer whispering the story of its maker, their traditions, and their relationship with the materials.