Maria Fernanda Cardoso, one of Latin America’s most celebrated artists, exhibits her solo show at the Frankston Arts Centre as part of Ventana Arte, Frankston City Council’s annual Latin Arts Festival.
Gumnut Spheres celebrates the wonder, beauty and astonishing complexity of nature and pays homage to the land Cardoso now calls home.
Hailed for her distinctive ability to transform unconventional materials into awe-inspiring installations, sculptures, performances and videos, Cardoso’s work is typified by exhaustive research processes, and as a result, each project is realised over many years. Her long established practice blends nature, art, science and technology, with many of her creations now held by the world’s foremost contemporary art museums.
In a career spanning almost four decades she has collaborated with scientists, cinematographers, microscopists, videographers, sound-artists, industrial designers and landscape architects on a richly diverse range of projects, such as the fabled The Cardoso Flea Circus (1994-2000), for which she spent six-years...training live fleas to perform such surprising feats as walking tightropes, pulling chariots, jumping through hoops and dancing the tango. The work is now held in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern.
In 2003 Cardoso represented Colombia at the Venice Biennale, and she has developed major exhibitions for MoMA New York, Centre Georges Pompidou, Centro Reina Sofia, New York New Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona La Caixa, Miami Art Museum, Daros Latinamerica, Bogota Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango BLAA, New York Chelsea Art Museum and Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum.
Resident in Australia since 1997, Cardoso was honoured with a survey exhibition, Zoomorphia, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney in 2003. She is represented in the permanent collections of the MCA and the National Gallery of Australia, has created major installations for the Biennale of Sydney, Freemantle Arts Centre and the Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, presented a sell-out season of The Cardoso Flea Circus at Sydney Opera House, and exhibited at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art.
She has completed six public art commissions around the world, including While I Live I Will Grow, for the City of Sydney: a living artwork on the site of the former South Sydney Hospital at Green Square.
In this latest body of work, Cardoso continues her exploration of organic native Australian materials and traditions, turning her attention to natural wonders—so integral to her local surroundings in New South Wales—that their astonishing inherent beauty is often overlooked.
For Gumnut Spheres Maria has created a series of sculptures composed of diverse species of the eucalyptus’ tough, wooden seed capsules. With its lush green foliage, showy blooms (made up mostly of anthers) and woody gumnuts, the eucalyptus is Australia’s most recognised and iconic plant, and Cardoso believes, a living world that should be celebrated.
“To me, the eucalyptus is an artist, and gumnuts are its artworks,” Cardoso comments. “As a trained sculptor, I can only dream of carving with such skill, to produce these perfectly shaped wooden sculptures. The eucalyptus tree does it naturally, after practising for over 100 million years to get these shapes right.
The toughness and durability of the gumnut Cardoso says, is integral to her concept. Made of solid hardwood to survive fire, floods and other weather conditions, they are the perfect material from which to make art that can be enjoyed for hundreds of years to come.
“Some plants protect their seeds inside of soft fruit. But this is Australia, where resilience and toughness are striking characteristics of our environment, our history and also contemporary culture. To me, the gumnut is the perfect symbol of what it means to be Australian,” she concludes.
Cardoso was born in 1963 in Bogotá, Colombia, and studied visual arts at the Universidad de Los Andes. In 1987, she won a scholarship to study at the prestigious Yale University Art School, and moved to the USA, hoping to discover a safe place to call home, away from the violence that had plagued her native country throughout her youth.
It was during her time at Yale that Cardoso first married a lifelong fascination with science and nature, with her artistic endeavours: setting the scene for a career inspired by the intrinsic forms of animal and plant life, and defined by her unique ability to represent this natural world back to audiences in unexpected ways.
During the early1990s she lived and worked in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and in 1997 moved to Sydney with her Australian husband. Here she finally found the haven she had longed for, for many years: remodelling a 1970s brick home into a garden paradise in the seaside suburb of Malabar filled with art, plants, books and a sizeable LP collection, almost (but not quite) as impressive and eclectic, as the artist herself.
Entrada actualizada el el 21 abr de 2022
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