Artist Statement
I create large-scale abstract reliefs—painting-like sculptures built from thick, textured layers of acrylic, plaster, refurbished paint, and foraged materials. Their surfaces rise into peaks and valleys, crack and erode, shift from rough to smooth, brilliant to opaque—evoking weathered walls, eroded landscapes, and topographic maps. Each work is a personal act of map-making: a way to root myself in ever-shifting ground.
Born in Santos, Brazil, and raised in São Paulo, I immigrated to Canada at age ten. Since then, I have moved over forty times—uprooted by circumstance, natural forces, and the pull of new horizons. This constant state of transition, adaptation, and assimilation has shaped everything I make. Art became my way of belonging: soaking canvases in Hawaii’s Pacific waters, exposing them to Canada’s subzero cold, listening to what the elements reveal.
Now based in Salt Lake City, Utah, I begin each piece by gathering what the land offers—iron-rich desert dirt, sawdust, charcoal, salt from the Great Salt Lake. In the studio, I layer local newspaper, plaster, and paint, then surrender control, letting the materials move, crack, and settle into form. The process is fast, intuitive, collaborative.
These works explore place, home, belonging, migration, and the passage of time. They are tools for orientation—quiet records of the environment that made them. Through them, I invite viewers to reconsider what it means to ground oneself in new surroundings and to find resonance in the impermanent.
Born in Santos, Brazil, and raised in São Paulo, I immigrated to Canada at age ten. Since then, I have moved over forty times—uprooted by circumstance, natural forces, and the pull of new horizons. This constant state of transition, adaptation, and assimilation has shaped everything I make. Art became my way of belonging: soaking canvases in Hawaii’s Pacific waters, exposing them to Canada’s subzero cold, listening to what the elements reveal.
Now based in Salt Lake City, Utah, I begin each piece by gathering what the land offers—iron-rich desert dirt, sawdust, charcoal, salt from the Great Salt Lake. In the studio, I layer local newspaper, plaster, and paint, then surrender control, letting the materials move, crack, and settle into form. The process is fast, intuitive, collaborative.
These works explore place, home, belonging, migration, and the passage of time. They are tools for orientation—quiet records of the environment that made them. Through them, I invite viewers to reconsider what it means to ground oneself in new surroundings and to find resonance in the impermanent.