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Articles> Ana Maria Pacheco

Ana Maria Pacheco: Talking Heads
Green Pebble June 2009 issue

 

 

 

 

 

Image published with permission of the artist

It’s not often that an ordinary person comes across a cabinet full of pale, disembodied heads, each gazing impassively at a large gold-plated Pecten Maximus, or giant scallop. It’s not often, either, that Ana Maria Pacheco incorporates text into her sculptures.

But given that this sculptor, who was born in Brazil in 1943 and has lived in England since 1973, is constantly searching for ways to stop the viewer in their tracks - to encourage them to consider issues that are both specific to Latin America and yet universal in nature - both the heads and text have become integral to the intention of her latest sculpture, Memória Roubada II, which will be on show at this year’s Salthouse 09 exhibition.

Memória Roubada II is part of a diptych which Ana Maria Pacheco started in May 2001 when she unveiled Memória Roubada, another polychromed wood and gold leaf sculpture incorporating a cabinet containing heads. Completed for Norway’s National Touring Exhibitions, this sculpture’s highly-animated, vivid heads react to a bright red heart impaled by six golden daggers. Here too there is text; on the cabinet doors.

‘Normally I don’t use text,’ Ana Maria explains from her studio in London. ‘I think it’s been said that when you use text, you don’t trust the image.’ She laughs at the notion. ‘In this instance, I thought it was important. It creates ambivalence in the work.’

In the case of Memória Roubada, the text addresses colonization’s violent undertones. In Memória Roubada II, by contrast, the text reads: ‘. . . And do not consent or allow the Indians who live on the said islands and mainland, whether already in our possession or to be won in the future, to suffer any offence to their person or their goods, but see to it that they are well and justly treated.’

These instructions were issued in the mid-1400s by Isabella de Castile, Queen of Spain and wife of King Ferdinand II of Aragon. They implore the colonists to be fair and evenhanded in their occupation of the Americas. Sadly, as history demonstrates, the colonization of the Americas by the Spanish and Portuguese was anything but fair and peaceful, sounding an ironic note within a sculpture that turns numerous assumptions on their head.

It is unusual for Ana Maria - whose international reputation is built on deep, often dark, interpretations of folklore and myth - to incorporate anything as banal as a cabinet into her installations, and yet in both pieces of the diptych she deliberately introduces a domestic element to the composition. For each work she has taken a cabinet and transformed it into an oversized oratory; a devotional device brought to Brazil by the Portuguese which houses figures of saints for private prayer.

‘I have used a cupboard and taken it out of context by putting heads on the shelves,’ she explains. ‘That switches it to something else. You don’t normally have a cupboard full of heads but that was the intention, to make a switch in terms of the familiar and the unfamiliar.’
To differentiate the heads in Memória Roubada II from the animated, emotional heads perched on the shelves of Memória Roubada, Ana Maria has kept the latest heads deliberately small, pale and impassive, each set apart from its neighbour by its own unique, carefully-created bone structure.

‘They are more like automatons, they are detached.’

And before there is mention of a Freudian interpretation for the use of severed heads in her works, Ana Maria quashes any sexual references by stating, ‘The reason I use heads is to do with the separation between the head and the body. It’s an odd thing, but our society is still pervaded with this idea that we should use reason when making a judgment. By using reason, we can justify anything, including atrocities. I am much more sympathetic to Blaise Pascal, who said that great judgments and great thoughts come from the heart.’

And so Ana Maria Pacheco’s heads sit aloof, on shelves, in judgment of Queen Isabella’s well-intentioned but ineffectual words, and overlook a gold-plated giant scallop.

‘The shell, it could suggest oil, because of the Shell symbol,’ Ana Maria says. ‘But of course a shell means more than that, it is also a symbol of rebirth. Life. So there we have a double take as well.’

The fact that the daggers in Memória Roubada are coated in gold leaf could provide insight into the gold on the shell in Memória Roubada II. ‘In Catholic countries, a heart pierced by seven swords is a common icon referring to Mary, but I used daggers instead of swords in Memória Roubada because they are connected with treason, and I covered them in gold because of the atrocities that occurred in the Brazilian gold mines in the 18th century.’

And so Ana Maria Pacheco’s pieces resonate with layers of history, providing one possible interpretation and then giving the piece yet another twist so that other paths emerge, to be explored yet further.

‘I like to refer to the past, bring it into the present, and transform it,’ says Ana Maria of her philosophy.

But therein lies a challenge. Ana Maria’s work heavily references myths, symbols and icons unfamiliar to a western public. Ideally she would prefer to let her work speak for her, but if she doesn’t give western art lovers the occasional slight nudge, some of the subtleties of her work could go unenjoyed.

‘We live in such fragmented times in terms of culture, I cannot expect people to know the references. I come from a different part of the world with different stories.’

And so she hints at possible interpretations for other elements of her sculptures, prints and paintings.

Her figures have large, bulging eyes, for instance, because their gaze intrigues her. ‘The gaze is an interesting thing. When you look at a gaze, you are looking through another reality. When you talk to someone, you look into their gaze. And when I have a group [of people in a sculpture or painting], their eyes establish a physical connection between the disparate elements in the group. For all these reasons, I like to explore the gaze.’

The people in Ana Maria’s sculptures are renowned for their ‘lumpish’ shapes. These reflect the Brazilian countryside; a force that, according to Ana Maria, threatened her as a child. ‘Like the descendants of the locals and the colonisers, there was this thing for myself and my family, a fear of the environment. As a young student I drew an enormous amount of the landscape that surrounded the city in which I was born because I wanted to understand it. If I was to do work that made sense to me, I had to know instinctively where I came from. I was going to draw the landscape until I understood it, and eventually it happened, and in the process I created a structure in my work that today is the result of 40 years of searching.’

Ana Maria Pacheco was born and grew up in Goiânia in the state of Goiás. Her world consisted of vast landscapes, rivers, religious syncretism and the love of a good family; in particular her parents, who ensured that all the Pacheco children were raised well, with music in their lives.
She obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sculpture from the University of Goiás and a Music degree from the Federal University of Goiás; she then went on to do a post-graduate degree in Music and Education at the University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.

There followed positions as a lecturer at the School of Fine Arts and the School of Architecture at the University of Goiás, and the Institute of Art at the Federal University of Goiás.

Then, perpetually hungry for further insights into her origins, Ana Maria won a British Council Scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1973, and her journey to familiarize herself with her country’s European roots was finally able to begin.

As far as Ana Maria is concerned, to be born Brazilian is to be born the product of colonialism. A duality saturates the culture which is shaped by both indigenous and extraneous influences. Ana Maria cites the slave trade as an example. The introduction of African slaves had a direct impact on Brazil’s cultural heritage. Middle Eastern influences too entered the country through Portuguese traders who already had dealings with Arab nations. Then, of course, there were the Portuguese themselves, with their religion, laws and language.

‘Coming from a colonised country, you have one foot in one place and another in the other, so you are always very unsettled if you want to understand where you come from,’ she elaborates. ‘You speak a European language but on a very different continent. And because the whole idea behind colonisation is to impose a very different infrastructure on the existing one, I am the product of that kind of cultural interaction and miscegenation.’

Over the past forty years her ambition has been to explore many of the issues raised by this dichotomy. And by coming to the UK and tracing firsthand the origins of Brazil’s European culture, she has indeed gained valuable insight into what it is to be Brazilian.

‘I had to come to Europe because that was where the whole thing started, and then when I did find the missing link, that was a wonderful feeling. I became far more confident in terms of the language that started to evolve in my work.’

The missing link? Ana Maria speaks animatedly about ‘mishmashes’, Baroque, Europe, and domination. Here in Europe she has had the opportunity to be exposed to the original, raw ingredients; in Brazil these elements – be they religious influences, music, art - have been assimilated and transformed into something ‘completely different’.

This idea of linkage, assimilation and transformation is not only essential to Ana Maria’s understanding of self, but it is echoed in the imagery of her work and in the way she works. A multi-talented artist, she is best known for her large sculptures and installations, yet her prints and paintings offer possibly the clearest insights into how she thinks, discards and builds.

‘[My prints and paintings] didn’t come about because I fancied doing prints, or I fancied doing paintings,’ she says modestly. ‘They evolved through an intrinsic need of the work. One of the most difficult issues of our time is subject matter. We have access to so many things, so much material, it means we don’t have a ground we can go confidently along. By exploring different approaches [through print and painting], they give me an opening.’

She often starts with printmaking, be the medium etching, drypoint, woodcut, screenprint or lithography. ‘Printmaking is fundamental because it’s where I discover all the new images. It’s like a library, or a store, where I keep the images so that later I can go back and develop them.’

Once she is satisfied that an idea is beginning to crystalise, she moves on to doing several paintings, sometimes using oil pastels and at other times oils and tempera. Because she paints her sculptures, and because the luminescence of the paint is of enormous importance to these sculptures, painting on paper allows her to experiment with the use and relationships of colour.

‘In sculpture, colour is not the most important thing, but it does create a mood to help the reading of what I want to present,’ she says.

By the time she comes to doing her sculpture, she adds, ‘I have internalized all these experiences so that I don’t have to worry too much.’ She is free to sculpt because she knows what her journey holds.

Her subject matter is vast – Christianity, oppression, domination, identity, journeys, magic, sexuality, fears, secrets. But although her topics can be dark and uncomfortable, the works are executed with a luminescence that often suggests there is something positive to come from every experience.

‘When you cannot escape something, you have to face it,’ she says. ‘And you have to look at the other side of one’s self. That’s not a negative, on the contrary, it is an affirmation of life.’

At the age of 66, does Ana Maria have sufficient inspiration for further life-affirming works?

‘The danger is you start to walk a well-known path,’ she concurs. ‘Of course it is much more pleasant to know exactly where you are, but the danger is that your work becomes stale because you lose all the excitement of the discovery. That is why I try new things at all times. I like to deal with something I don’t know. I like the excitement.’

Ana Maria Pacheco’s work is on permanent display in the public collection at Norwich Castle Museum and works for sale are available through Pratt Contemporary Art. Memória Roubada II, together with the works by some 50 other artists, will be on display at Salthouse 09, Salthouse, Norfolk, from 2 July to 2 August, 2009.

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