Arts Week with Judy Murphy
Growing up in the remote interior of Brazil in the middle of the 20th century, Catholicism wasn’t part of Ana Maria Pacheco’s daily life. But it was all around her and its influences can be seen in the artist’s powerful, sometimes disturbing sculptures and prints being exhibited in the Connacht Tribune Printworks for Galway International Arts Festival.
Her father’s family were staunchly Catholic, her mother’s were so protestant that Ana Maria’s maternal grandfather embarked on a journey to Brazil’s interior to try and convert people to the Baptist faith.
It was a thankless task in a hugely Catholic country, she says with a laugh. But her parents’ differing backgrounds gave her the best of both worlds. Ana Maria, who inherited her mother’s work ethic and her father’s extroverted approach to the world, graduated with degrees in fine art and music before deciding to focus on art. She moved to England in 1973 to continue her studies at London’s Slade College of Art.
Part of her reason for emigrating was because of Brazil’s history.
“I couldn’t do the work I wanted to do because of the colonial culture,” she says, adding that in a country such as Brazil, there’s a tendency among the new establishment ‘to ape’ what their former rulers are doing, “believing it to be better or more important”. It’s true creatively as well as politically and “is something an Irish person would understand”, she feels.
“I come from the interior of Brazil, I am interested in history and wanted to do work that would resonate for that part of the world,” explains Ana Maria of the former Portuguese colony. And the only way she could do it was by leaving.
The England she moved to was “totally opposed to my own culture”, she recalls but that displacement allowed her to change her vision and her way of working.
“All my memories of childhood emerged then and to convey the feelings I had to do 3-D work.”
The result is the magnificent wooden installations, that are on display in the Tribune Printworks. There are two largescale pieces, while the third is smaller in scale but not in impact.
Memória Roubada I and II (Stolen Memory) consists of wooden cabinets containing a series of disembodied heads. In Stolen Memory I, made in 2001, the six heads, although disembodied, are not dead. They are in various states of distress, something Ana Maria portrays by the tilt of a head, the shape of a mouth, the look in an eye. The heads are gazing towards a lifelike heart on the ground which has been pierced with seven daggers. The image is drawn from Catholicism and represent the seven sorrows of Mary. But rather than having her heart being pierced by the traditional seven swords, Ana Maria has employed daggers – a symbol of betrayal.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
