Newsletter  217
May 2022

The residency season is well on track. One of the first activities was to install the exhibition with Sherry Wiggins and Luis Branco (which will run until 4 June). A second exhibition: Resonnancies da Terra with Ingrid Simons, will open on 14 May.

THE MIRROR BETWEEN US is an exhibition with an overview of collaborative work of Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco. Luís Branco made highly intriguing photos of Sherry Wiggins in the landscape surrounding the OBRAS Centre. The exhibition contemplates on aging, human-nature relation and beauty.
Their art work fits perfectly well in the baroque atmosphere of the S. Vicente church. The opening event on 16 April was both impressive and informal, and the short concert by Andreia Vaz on violin was of high quality and touched the mood of everybody. The slide show gives an impression of both the exhibition and the inauguration. Most of the photos are from Pedro Barral.
See this page for an impression of the project and gives links to more background information.

Rob Monaghan (Ireland) took a dive in a lake of an abandoned marble quarry near to Vila Viçosa, Portugal. He did it for pleasure, but first of all for the art. Rob is working on an exhibition in the Municipal Museum of Estremoz, Portugal (September 2023).
Rob explores human/nature relationships. Recurring themes are ones of belonging, identity, place/time combinations and human intervention with the natural environment.
Rob had artistic residencies at OBRAS-Portugal in 2017, 2018 and 2019. A selection of his findings were exhibited in the Damer House, Tipperary, Ireland (2017), the Babyforest woodlands in West Cork, Ireland (2018) and the  Galeria do Palaçio Barrocal, Evora, Portugal (2019). During his residencies, Rob established long-term collaborations with other artists, resulting in presentations in various galleries and screening environments in Sweden, USA and Ireland.

Rob returned for a short orientation visit in April. He is scheduled to have an exhibition in 2023 in the Galeria de D. Dinis of the museum of Estremoz. But after having seen the exhibition space in the fortress of Evoramonte he very much prefers that space over the Galeria de D. Dinis and requested us to propose the museum to shift his exhibition to there. He will create some multimedia installations.
Rob also found the time to do a collaborative project with Ingrid Simons: Ingrid dripped Chinese ink in a quarry lake and Rob recorded the result from under water. It caused a pattern of black, grey and white that very much reminds to the brush strokes in Ingrid´s oil paintings.

Emma van Meyeren (Holland) is an emerging writer. Recently she wrote an essay on mourning. At OBRAS she was working on a novel. She took two female characters from two highly successful books, one from the 60th and the other from the 80th. Emma is of the opinion that both books are in essence highly sexist and that the two female characters are severely underexposed. In Emma´s novel the two women meet each other and get an affair.

Antonio Tavares (Portugal) was working at OBRAS Portugal in the month of March. He felt that he needs the isolation and the big studio to be creative and to work with sizes that he can not do at home. 

Ingrid Simons (Holland) was scheduled to have an exhibition in the prestigious Galeria D. Dinis of the Municipal museum of Estremoz first. Due to Covid it had to be postponed twice, but this year it finally happens. The exhibition runs until 25 june.
  
Ingrid began her career painting church interiors and urban landscapes, and later focused on nature.
When she started her annual residencies at OBRAS in 2010, she adapted her approach. Although she was still seeking what a landscape awakens in her and what makes a landscape sublime, she increasingly felt that the raw nature of Alentejo became a part of her being. She shifted from interpreting nature to experiencing nature: connecting with its pureness and power, and taking time to submerge.  As a result, she now paints more intuitively. Her landscapes have become more abstract in form and colour. Due to this freedom, she has found the richness in cloudy skies, in mirroring water, and in the colours of dusk.
Her fascination with human/nature relationships has manifested in work inspired by artificial lakes in abandoned marble quarries where nature reclaims the manmade space. This subject is shown in a number of paintings and ceramic works in this exhibition.
See this page for info on Ingrid Simons at OBRAS over the past 10(!) years.

Martine de Kok (Belgium) is a multi-media artist. She was drawing, composing music, singing and improvising on the piano. During an excursion to a marble area she was exploring the acoustics of the quarries and recording the sound of her voice. But her main activity was writing a children’s´ book. It tells about birds of all kinds and characters who try to understand the phenomenon of time, and specifically to accept that time goes by. During her artist talk Martine read a part. All were impressed both by the text and her theatrical performance.

Fiona Connor (Ireland) was working on an exhibition that she will get in Monsaraz in 2023. She was making oil paintings and crayon drawings of the nature around OBRAS. She felt a deep connection with the landscapes, the colour patterns and the trees. Fiona assumes that is this feeling is due to the thousands years of history that this landscape incorporates.  Fiona did the paintings on canvasses and wood panels. The drawings however, were on brown paper backs, not only to make a statement, but also because for her they had the perfect colour and structure for crayon.   

Léon Biezeman (Holland) returned to OBRAS Holland to continue working on his second book for dyslectic children. It is about a kid that very much enjoys his holidays at the grandparents, but he has strange experiences when looking at the newspaper, when picking a box with flower bulbs … These are his first steps in a voyage towards understanding.
Léon is also working on a theater play on dyslexia.

Connor Power (Ireland) was working on a series of short stories: historical fiction about Irish monks who came to Portugal in the 13th century, to teach the Alentejo monks the techniques of illuminated scripts. Connor´s research showed striking similarities in colour and ornamentation. An additional fascination of Connor is the Celtic culture that Ireland and Portugal have in common. In pre-Roman times it probably came from Iberia to Britannia and Ireland. It helped Ireland flourishing up to early mediaeval times, while in Portugal it was largely (but certainly not completely) lost due to Roman, Visigoth and Arabic ruling.   

In October 2021, Luc van der Velde (Belgium) made a series of land-art installations dedicated to combining natural with artificial materials. One was a 2x4 meters jute tissue covered with local clay. He did hang it between two rocks.
It is now May 2022 and the jute tissue is still hanging, although wind and rain caused some changes. It became more transparent and the edges decayed, in other words it started merging into the landscape (see also residents 2021). 

During his residency in 2021, Stefano Falcone (Italy) was working on a CD that will be released by the end of 2022. It is entitled “OBRAS”. Another resident: Tim Gleason (USA) will design the cover of the CD and some other residents will write a short text.  

also good to know:

The ruins of the water mill, a 20 minutes’ walk from our house, may get a second life. Or better: a third life. The second was given by several artists-in-residence, by cleaning the space, using it as scene for photo shoots, performances and cultural happenings. The legal owners popped up and consider it to make it a place that shows its history and honor its surrounding nature. They and we are eager to collaborate.

About OBRAS:
In November 2021, Foundation OBRAS made a kind of a new start. It got two new board members, it updated its statutes and the House Governance Rules, and adopted the newest regulations and codes on Governance Culture, on Fair Practice and on Diversity & Inclusion.

We decided that in specific cases emerging artists may be eligible for a discount on the weekly rate of 100€. 

We are contemplating on initiating art related activities that could contribute to stopping the crisis in Ukraine.