A recently published monograph on Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes, titled Sonia Gomes: Assombrar o mundo com beleza [Sonia Gomes: I Haunt the World with Beauty], sheds light on the artist’s ways of working, which involve the body, gestures, language, and a variety of materials, especially textiles. It begins with a series of aphorisms and poems by Gomes (including the passage quoted above), continues with a photo essay showing the artist’s creative process, and ends with several curatorial essays and images of the artist’s works. These include Casa alugada (2022, fig. 1) and Estrela da manhã (2021, fig. 2), acquired by the Austrian Ludwig Foundation and on loan to MAK – Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.

Among the many aphorisms and poems, besides the sentence that inspires the book’s title, the artist writes: “The skin can be the deepest part of the body.”² This statement is revealing, since Gomes’s work is often seen from the perspective of her biography and what it has meant for her work to have had such late recognition, which, to a large extent, is due to her being a Black woman in an unequal, racist country like Brazil. Black researchers, such as artist Renata Felinto, have shown how—due to Brazil’s colonial history, its system of slavery (the longest lasting in the Americas), and its structural racism—the historiography of Brazilian art has erased the contribution of African diasporic communities to the formation of the country’s visual culture, thus obliterating knowledge that Black groups and communities have shared over the centuries by oral and informal transmission.³ These communities carried knowledge that was passed down from one generation to the next, relating not only to social and political organization (as the many quilombos founded during the colonial period demonstrate), but also to technical and scientific knowledge and artistic education. The latter involved the transmission of manual practices and techniques within families and local contexts, and continues to this day in communities throughout Brazil. This kind of artistic education also finds expression in the works of Black women artists who employ techniques such as weaving, embroidery, and modeling with clay and other materials, such as Ana das Carrancas (1923–2008), Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt (1919–77), or Maria Auxiliadora (1935–74), who are considered “non-artists,” on the border between art and craft.⁴

Gomes’s trajectory exhibits particularities that contradict this story. She received a law degree and worked as a lawyer, only later devoting herself to artistic work, which initially led to her being seen—like so many women artists in Brazil—as an “artist-artisan."⁵ But her production defies categorization. In her studio, besides what can be called her archives, which contain a wide variety of fabrics, objects, threads, and other materials related to textile production, the artist has a rack with a selection of garments that she customized for herself in her youth (fig. 3). There are jackets, pairs of pants, skirts, dresses, and T-shirts that Gomes bought but then took apart and remade in her own style, transforming them into unique pieces. Maybe the word “customized” should be queried here, since these were made in a context in which recycling or customizing one’s clothes was not a common practice in the fashion world. It’s worth pointing out that Gomes’s early forays into fashion are associated with customs that were very widespread in Brazil as late as the 1990s: the family seamstress who would visit the home to craft garments for the young women, or the clothes made by grandmothers and mothers for their daughters, at a time when department stores and industrial clothing production were not that common in Brazil. In the 1960–80s there were no collaborative stores run by designers or collectives working on the creation of exclusive pieces at prohibitive prices, or the incorporation of vernacular practices, so to speak—street fashion, for instance—into the realm of high fashion. The artist’s wardrobe offered her the possibility of reinventing herself as an individual, of making herself present and leaving a mark, rejecting the invisibility imposed on Black people in a society insisting on erasing them—even considering everything that the African diaspora has contributed to the formation of Brazilian culture. Gomes’s wardrobe thus gradually became something like a second, deeper skin, through which she would reconnect with sources that have also been made invisible but that generated the strength of her work. 

In considering Gomes’s shift toward artistic production, the six months she spent in San Francisco, California, in the 1990s is a crucial time, a moment when the artist had the opportunity to gather informal artistic experience from the streets, from mass and pop culture, in a location on which the hippie movement had left its mark. In this period, the artist made handbags from different materials, reworking her habit of combining and deconstructing fabrics and forms that have already been designed and worn. 

Even if Gomes’s work originates from a collection of textiles, buttons, stones, embroidery, and other materials, the objects she produces are not tapestries or decorative panels. The body, its gestures and movements are essential to her works, and their poetics can only be understood by recognizing these elements. In the course of expanding her wardrobe, Gomes accumulated several collections of fabrics and textiles that had already been given shape: garments, curtains, tablecloths, and small pieces of home decor. The clothes she receives as donations and/or gifts have been worn, thus carrying memories and traces of gestures of their previous owners, like the pieces in her own wardrobe. She did not have formal training in sewing or knitting, and her process involves deconstructing clothes and textiles, stripping them of their distinctive original form. The way the threads are sewn and/or knitted into the fabric does not reproduce any particular stitching or sewing technique, but rather redesigns lines, patterns, textures, and color combinations that are discontinuous and fragmented. In this, her work is very different from that of artists who construct shapes and compositions from textiles, and who have a clear knowledge of sewing and embroidery techniques. 

As in the artistic field, so also in her family life and in relation to the history of the municipality where she was raised, Gomes had the experience of living between two worlds. The daughter of a Black mother and a white father, Gomes was born in Caetanópolis, in the state of Minas Gerais, a town that was marked by the textile industry.⁶ It is significant that her hometown was a textile industry hub, which was certainly present in her imagination and gave her daily access to the production of clothes, accessories, and the like. The artist understands the use of fabrics, clothes, ornaments, and beads in her work as linked to the place where she was raised: for Gomes, this universe is part of the vernacular culture of Minas Gerais. Caetanópolis is also the birthplace of singer, performer, and songwriter Clara Nunes (1942–83). Gomes and Nunes are of the same generation, and when the artist was making handbags and handcrafted objects, the musician’s compositions—which referenced Afro-diasporic culture—and her on-stage persona had already made her a legend of MPB (Música Popular Brasileira).⁷ On stage, she wore customized clothes and props made of several different materials, including headdresses full of beads and cowrie shells.

Both of these practices evolved against the backdrop of Brazil’s artistic and intellectual milieu, which, since the 1950s if not earlier, has tried to consolidate the idea of a national culture, an effort which involves a survey of sources, a systematic study of so-called “popular” artistic practices, and a questioning of the foundations of artistic production. This movement reached its peak in the early 1960s with the founding of the CPC (Centro Popular de Cultura).⁸ In parallel, this was a moment marked by emerging experimentation in the fields of theater, cinema, and music—the latter transformed by the arrival of Tropicalismo and MPB, which culminated in the popular music festivals on the television channel Record.⁹ These festivals launched some of the most famous, internationally acclaimed singers and songwriters of Brazilian music, including Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil (who are associated with Tropicália), Chico Buarque, and many others. This time is marked by the hiatus of the civil-military dictatorship (1964–85), which entered its last phase—the so-called “political opening”—in the second half of the 1970s, when the country saw a resurgence of transgressive artistic and cultural work, traversed by debates regarding feminism, homosexuality, and other topics.¹⁰ These discourses also emphasized performativity as a key strategy of transgression, as evidenced by Gomes’s wardrobe.

For Gomes, textiles carry memories and traces of the bodies that have inhabited them. To return to her sentence, “the skin can be the deepest part of the body,” the artist does indeed allude to the body, not only through the remaining gestures, but also the shapes she designs by deconstructing the textiles in her archives. Photo documentation of the artist at work shows her bending metal bars with broad arm movements, expanding her body in space (figs. 4 and 5). Moreover, the shapes she creates by suturing fabrics together,¹¹ a bead attached with a thread to bundles that look tangled, are very similar to the insides of the body—the fasciae, internal organs, veins, and tendons. Especially in the works she calls Pendentes the act of suturing varied fabrics into misshapen bundles is very visceral. This is the case with Untitled (2019, fig. 6) and Eros (2018, fig. 7)—which, like MAK’s Estrela da manhã, recalls the muscles around the heart. This is even more evident in her Telas-corpos, such as Intervalo (2020–21, fig. 8) and Untitled (2022, fig. 9), where the lines and colors sewn onto the surface of the canvas jump out, forming misshapen pendants that pour down on the floor, almost like we were witnessing a scalping. 

Her Pano series also refers to this bodily, organic dimension: Rosa amarrotada (2014, fig. 10), for instance, creates the impression of skin, where the marks are vestigial records of a fragmented narrative. The Relíquias and Patuás series, in turn, both bear clear references to the links between body, ritual, and religion. Relics, a key component of Catholic practices, became widespread in Brazil with the production of ex-votos by popular artists and in museums dedicated to them.¹² One of Gomes’s works in the Relíquias series is titled Nascimento de Macunaíma (2022, fig. 11). Like the others, it is made of burlap to which the artist has attached other fabrics and fragments of embroidery, but here she creates a small bag (almost like a uterus) with a zipper opening that spills out necklaces made of seeds and indigenous beads.¹³ A patuá is an object considered to have protective energy that is part of Afro-diasporic religious and cultural practices. It is a talisman or an amulet made of fabric, stuffed with the color of the orisha of which its owner is a votary. In Untitled, from the Patuá series (2005, fig. 12), the artist creates a kind of bundle of tangled fabrics and threads attached to structures that are covered with scraps of colored fabrics that protrude like small arches. Unlike the actual cult objects, Gomes’s Patuás are sculptural objects that expand in space and consist of twists.

The process used in the Patuás is brought back in the Torções series, which includes perhaps the artist’s best-known works. Here, the wire that appeared in the protrusions of the Patuás takes on a choreographic aspect, creating deconstructed forms that project spatially. In Torção (2022, fig. 13), the artist bends thicker pieces of wire in order to form a design of contiguous circles that are sutured together by thick colored threads, which are finally tied by ropes. The end result suggests a dancer’s movements in spiral circumvolutions. In the room dedicated to Gomes’s work at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo in 2023, these compositions took center stage.¹⁴ 

Casa alugada, the work now present in the MAK collection, was produced at the same time as Gomes was preparing her exhibit for the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, the year when she worked on her Entre pérola e vergalhão series. Here Gomes returns to the processes she has previously experimented with in her Patuás and her twists, but with something new: the use of thick rebar that creates a kind of foundation on which she lays out bundles of fabrics and a variety of elements, such as embroidery, beads, fabric yo-yos (which we see in Casa alugada), and delicate pearls. In Untitled (undated, fig. 14), a pearl is tied to the top of one of the work’s bent rebar supports. The contrast between the rebar and the delicate pearl creates tension, which seems to be what moves the artist in this series. In the piece at the MAK, this tension intensifies, since, unlike in Untitled, the rebar is bent into irregular curved shapes—thus the rectilinear, structural materials of concrete architecture and general construction take on a different aspect, softer and almost sensual.

This series is made up of objects built on a rebar foundation, to which Gomes ties a bundle of sutured fabrics and beads. The bundle is a very popular object in Brazil, especially responsive to concerns such as issues of displacement and domestic and informal work. Internal migration is an integral feature of Brazilian history, since economic factors and extreme weather events caused by deforestation and colonial exploitation were responsible for displacing large population groups inside the territory. The migrants who left Brazil’s northeastern states during the first great droughts and who arrived in the richer southeast (São Paulo and Rio) from the early 1940s onward often walked with bundles containing their few personal belongings. They were immortalized at the time in paintings by artists such as Cândido Portinari (1903–62). In rural communities throughout Brazil, laundry also involves bundles, which are used to transport the items destined to be washed on the banks of rivers and creeks. 

Gomes claims that the titles of her works are metaphors, hinting at memories and reminiscences of experiences in daily life. However, Casa alugada can indeed evoke these stories of displacement, diaspora, eviction and, ultimately, exile. In the artist’s own words, she is a collector of stories and memories, which are present in the materials she uses and deconstructs in her work. The bundle in Casa alugada is a patuá (something that protects), but it is also something temporary. 

The narrative that the art world and the artist herself have constructed about Gomes’s work has for a long time been guided by these popular references in her creations. Gomes’s studio in Pinheiros—now a vibrant central area of São Paulo—includes, besides the archives of raw materials for her work, a small manufacturing infrastructure, albeit manual, with seamstresses and other assistants who help her on a daily basis. But the access to this space is through the artist’s stories about her wardrobe, thus highlighting her singularity and the place of affect in her work. 

Translation from Portuguese: Gegensatz Translation Collective

Copyediting and proofreading: Orit Gat

Sonia Gomes’s Estrela da manhã (2021) and Casa alugada (2022) were acquired by the Austrian Ludwig Foundation in 2023 and are on permanent loan to MAK – Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.