Brígida Baltar

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Actions in the house

In the 1990s, Brígida Baltar turned the studio at her home in the Botafogo district of Rio de Janeiro into an experimental laboratory. She dug holes and opened windows. She occupied unusual spaces, melding body and house. She gathered drips of water and tears, stripped walls bare, gathered together waste, collected pieces of the place. She photographed herself bathing, cutting her hair, and in other private activities. She wrote phrases on walls and ripped drawings. She planted herbs in bricks for cooking and receiving friends. An evident experiment in combining art and existence.

Actions in nature

The works in the house, of selecting and collecting memories and identities, reach out to the open air, incorporating the architecture of nature. A closet is filled with earth, trees are planted over buried personal objects, cotton wool is spread like skin over branches. Ephemeral substances, like dew and mist, are collected on excursions to the mountains. The urban landscape emerges in the reading of a book in a treetop on an afternoon by a busy road. The acts are photographed and filmed.

First glass and ceramic sculptures

Taking inspiration from her initial experiments, Brígida Baltar dives deeper in her manipulation of materials. Combinations of writing, intervention, and collecting are transposed to ceramic – more malleable – and glass, blown into organic sculptures in brickworks and laboratories. At this time Baltar also makes containers for capturing and storing atmospheric moisture.

Drawings and sculptures based on brick from her house

When Baltar moves from her house in Botafogo, she takes with her some brick dust in barrels, and throughout the 2000s she uses it to make new works. She shapes books and mountains and draws forests and plants on paper and walls. Brocade or lace-like patterns are revealed in dust on the floor and in the corners of rooms or in the her lattice sculptures, affirming her interest in informal geometry.

Between reality and fable

Veiled landscapes, metamorphosed bodies, fantastical meanings. Beaches and lakes emerge, home to hybrid creatures – crabs, carp, bee-women, and other beings that come to inhabit Baltar’s work. A more profound fabular narrative is woven.

Flying

In the late 2000s, Baltar seeks out partnerships to develop new projects. She harnesses elements of music and theatre to form her new works on flying, falling, shadows, winged sculptures, vertigo, flying machines. This is also when she begins her sculptures made of metal, like bronze.

Body, skin, siblings

In the mid-2010s the body, always present in Baltar’s work, gains a different treatment in response to her lived experiences. The resulting works include a set of embroidery pieces of bruises, blemishes, stray hairs, and sores. In this context, the chimerism of plants germinated in bronze sculptures and embroidery pieces of composite species pick up on the hybridity apparent in previous works. Although they refer to the body, the works reveal delicate textile abstractions and are sewn in very fine lines.

The flesh of the sea

A sense of great depth inspired by the imaginary beings that inhabit it. Organic ceramic pieces take shape, bordering on fiction, daydream, abstraction, and fantasy. Sea and flesh, strange bloody colors – humanized works that cry out, have urges, feel sad, and bathe in the sun. They bring to mind childhood beaches where she would dejectedly collect broken seashells, because she longed so strongly for ones that were whole. It is through fragments that Baltar discovers the potency of the incomplete.

films

“I wasn’t thinking of making films. All I really wanted to do was make holes in the wall, plant in bricks, bury stuff, harvest different substances…. but the acts and places were so particular that I needed a camera to record them.”