Lidia Lisbôa’s artistic process is distinguished by her immersion in the organic forms that permeate both nature and human bodies, characteristics that are present in her aesthetic intentions, in her performativity, in the entangled silhouettes, and in the complexities that surround our existences. This interest is deeply informed by her early introduction to crochet, at the age of 6, in an environment imbued with the influential presence of her aunts, figures who played a seminal role in her poetic journey. Crochet, sewing, clay, and their respective techniques metamorphose into expressive instruments that facilitate a fluid connection between the present and the past and evoke collective reminiscences of the family universe in the sewing ateliers. The materials are refined by shared narratives that gather in their wefts the knowledge, the traumas, the secrets, revealing to us a work that is all scarred.

Lisbôa’s childhood memories in Guaíra, Paraná, southern Brazil, reveal a myriad of elements in her compositions, from the termite mounds witnessed in her youth to the umbilical cord from her siblings, observed during childbirth. As well as reflecting the special details of the place where she grew up, her works mix family emotions and memories, even ancestral ones, incorporated by the artist herself through gestures, fabrics, and plasticities transformed into calligraphies, sometimes subtle, sometimes imposing. The nature present in her works expresses more than meets the eye; through visual metaphors, Lisbôa connects us deeply to the processes of warping, nesting, and also fabulatory expressions. From the evocative forms of teats, cocoons, and termite mounds that populate her creations appear vivid suggestions of nature’s flames under a fertile, vital, and nourishing perspective.

Lisbôa not only uses materialities in her creations, but also incorporates them into a perpetual cycle of creation and reinvention, linked to the richness and complexity of her expanded visual repertoire and her own body, full of lexicon, textures, and interpretations. Her structures resemble organs pregnant with life, which anticipate and celebrate the multiple processes of fecundation, germination, and continuity. Poetics thus defibrillates the fabrics of our relationships with the world and the bonds that sustain life in dilated seams and conformations.

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Curatorial text from the exhibition Lidia Lisbôa: Têta, MAR – Museu de Arte do Rio, 2024