Patrícia Domingues

Statement

I'm convinced that the way we present ourselves to the world can explain a great deal about each one of us and that the way we sort out and induce a reading of our work can be the initial key to the understanding of a piece.

What I would like to achieve is for people to look at my work as a whole and not as small collections or fragments of something. Continuity is something I have in mind throughout the entire creative process. I work on a theme which develops, suffers transformations and finds different materials and forms of expression. I´d like to believe that the themes or ideas on which we work are open and have plasticity. Nothing is static and nothing is right or wrong.

Over the last four years I have worked developing a broad spectrum of themes, which have given me the opportunity to evolve and change with them. I began with territorial issues and hypothetical reflections of borders in landscapes. Themes having to do with the individual and the collective concerned me as well as those on the cultures of different countries. In other words, the need that human beings have always had to divide up territory, creating spaces, real or imaginary, where one´s race-culture is safely developed, at a distance from others. The expression of the “outsider” is a reflection of this, remaining perpetually on the outside, in an abstract spacial division between that which is inside and that which is outside.

Over time my thinking has become more abstract. I started working on the theme of the line and its double meaning. By tracing a line, I provoke a separation in space or in the material, but those two sides, marked by the line, will also be connected with a union. The result of this process was a general interest for the division of things: of the earth, at times natural, other times provoked; of divisions of people; of elements; of processes; of space and of that which defines our schuster-nicole-schuster-nicole-beginning-2016-2016s and our ends, always keeping in mind that one cannot speak of fragmentation without speaking of union.

At the moment I am approaching different ways of entering into material, trying to free it and at the same time find new limits, sometimes changing and other times respecting its order.

Jewellery is the support for my ideas and as an applied art, can be the carrier of any kind of message. It is free in its existence. For me it works as the link between two bodies, physical and mental.

Patrícia Domingues, translated by Laura Rose.

CV