Solange Pessoa
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Solange Pessoa (born 1961, Ferros, Brazil) is a Brazilian contemporary artist known for installations, sculptures, drawings, and paintings that incorporate organic materials and explore relationships between nature and culture and is recognised, in Brazil and internationally, for her contributions to contemporary installation art, conceptual art, and sculpture.[1][2][3] Pessoa lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.[1][2][4]
Solange Pessoa is from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a "high place of the colonial baroque now an industrial force 'thanks' to its activities of iron extraction."[2] Her work is in part influenced by her surroundings, including the natural environment of her native Minas Gerais where the mining of iron ore, gemstones, gold, and other minerals is a prevalent cultural-historical force.[2]
In 1996–1997, Pessoa received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.[5]
She has been making art since the 1980s, incorporating organic materials into her work from early in her career.[1][2] According to Pessoa, "materials exist in connection with thoughts and intuitions. They call us and choose us, they attract our perception and curiosity, and their untransferable nature and mysteries require research and close observation."[6]
Critic Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira, in an academic essay on Pessoa's Cathedral, writes that her practice "performs a material philosophy of abjection and embodiment, where hair, leather, and wax become living forces rather than inert matter."[7] This emphasis on organic substances situates Pessoa within broader debates in contemporary eco-art and feminist theory.