Graticule

Abstract

My practice traces lines between geological phenomena and transatlantic history. As a jewellery artist and a stone cutter, I focus on the properties and qualities of materials but also on their respective histories and the environments we cohabit with them.

The fractures and the cuts I consciously create in materials are performative gestures and intersections of the materials’ stories and my own in the past and the present.

In this paper, while exploring a personal, fragmentary approach towards creative writing and revisiting family lineages, I will use an autoethnographic methodology to divagate between landscapes of union and disunion. I will embark on an interweaving of lines—my own, those of the material and of history—as a way of expanding my practice into a broader scene of ideas and events. From the boats docking in Lisbon during the fifteenth-century Portuguese colonial period, to the exploration of gemstones at German markets and my grandfather’s abandoned notebooks, how do the lines of history translate into a sequence of performative gestures? Where does the past end and the present begin?