A Fracturing Practice – Mapping Phenomenological and Emergent Encounters with Landscapes, Technologies, Events, Objects and Jewellery

Abstract

This research explores fractures and the process of fracturing in an intimate, poetic, historical, geological and technological exploration. The starting point arises from the handling of materials and from the disciplines of jewellery, craft and stonework. As I observed in my practice how materials and landscapes are cut, fractured and broken up, my notion of fragmentation and fractal interconnected dimensions progressed in depth. The environment, the practice and the maker are the result of animistic relations that constantly participate in and correspond to each other’s existence. Intrigued about the individuation processes between humans and the natural environment and how this separation brought different sights over the landscapes around us, I explore different views and relations that humans maintain with their surroundings: from phenomenological views to an animistic understanding of the world, to the objectifi cation of the land, to geological studies, to colonial and traumatic impositions, to more technological and digital views. I explore the idea that matter is sensitive and instead of inert, that it is embedded in live-ness. Human development is always a response to what is already latent in the materials and in the environments themselves. We connect sympathetically to things, to jewellery and smallscale objects which as fragments are mediators between us and wider realities. Through these fragments we connect symbiotically to the environment and start to make sense of the world. In the fi rst chapter, “Graticule,” I trace lines between geological phenomena and transatlantic history. I start wondering about intimate fractures generating connector lines between my incarnate story with the colonial and dictatorial history of Portugal. I conclude relating those experiences to my encounter with gemstones and gemstone markets in the city of Idar-Oberstein in Germany. As a jewellery artist and a stonecutter, I focus on the properties and qualities of materials but also on their respective histories and the environments we cohabit with them. In this chapter, while exploring a personal, fragmentary approach towards creative writing and revisiting family lineages, I use an autoethnographic methodology to divagate between landscapes of fractures and of union and disunion. I embark on an interweaving of lines – my own, those of the material and those of history – as a way of expanding my practice into a broader scope of ideas and events. From the boats docking in Lisbon during the fi fteenth-century Portuguese colonial period to the exploration of gemstones at German markets and my grandfather’s abandoned notebooks, how do these lines of history translate into a sequence of performative gestures? Where does the past end and the present begin? In the second chapter, “Notes from the Ground,” I share the experiences and visual materials collected during two different periods as artist-in-residence: one in the Kiefer Quarry in Salzburg, Austria, the other on the Isle of Mull in Scotland. In the Kiefer Quarry I observed the deconstruction of the mountain range into smaller fragments, and I then used this iconic landscape to refl ect through a fracturing relationship between the concrete idea of nature and its images, and symbolic and scientifi c representations. In Mull, time becomes an agent that fractures. Confronted with geological formations more than 2 million years old, I submerged into the phenomenological experience of that place, which contrasted with an effort to travel back in time to understand the geological and cultural past of the island. Finally, in the third chapter, “A Fracturing Practice,” I unfold a technological fracture, through jewellery, objects and installations, in which ancient ideas of skill and craft engage in a dialogue with current technological and digital discourses. Different technological and conceptual approaches towards material and digital landscapes help me fragment the work from different perspectives. The opening of a landscape becomes intimately connected with the understanding of it. In the projects Many Deliberated and Imagined Erosion, Continuous Landscape Cabochons and Occupied Fields, Gestural Garden and Standing Sources, Modern Animism and Studio`s Tokens, I explore distinct ways of fragmenting the landscape, looking at a range of techniques that vary from knapping stones, to core drills, to AI, to virtual spaces and digital scans. In my practice, craft and technology are means of questioning the kaleidoscopic ways humans have of delving into seemingly divided natural and artifi cial surroundings.