I read a review of this exhibition and knew I needed to go because of close-sounding similarities with my own work. I went with some fear, that she might have already trodden the path I was just starting on!
Mira was an Italian Jewish refugee who produced work from the 1950s to 1980s in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Some of her influences were similar to mine: textiles, architectural forms, Eastern philosophy, Chinese calligraphy. Initially a painter, in 1964 she was given a stack of rice paper which is soft and semi-transparent, and from then on used this material to create some 2000 works.
Sheets with drawn forms, or letters written and transferred (she was employed as a graphic artist), placed between acrylic sheets and discs and suspended; overlapping collaged sheets; paper worked on both sides, each visible viewed through the other; books made of transparent pages; blank sheets hung on a horizontal line.
Great delicacy and beauty, the works interacting with light, their own shadows and the empty space around.
'. . . I would say the line, often, just stimulates the void.'
'. . . while pursuing transparency as an issue I arrive at the object'
'. . . what really counted was the light and shade cast on the wall. . . '
At the level of form this really worked, the formal qualities communicate a lot. BUT on top of this she loaded more: slogans, lines of poetry written in different languages, symbols from maths and physics, ideas from western and eastern philosophy (particularly relating form and 'void') - all incomprehensible except to a few. So the formal transparency is offset by often impenetrable meanings, meanings which are not available from the work itself but require further research to bring out.
This underlined for me that in my own work I want to trust in what is visual to communicate what I have to say.
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