Field

Her research draws largely on her daily practice in the studio. In this environment, Bosquê handles and freely associates different materials, creating original compositions and developing specific methods to combine, juxtapose and join elements that are unlikely to occupy the same space in a different context. Brass, felt, bronze, coal, pitch, bee’s wax, beef casing, sheepskin, craft paper, coffee filters and wool are used indiscriminately. The artist is less interested in the origins or the potential symbolic weight of each of the items than in their physical presence. Experimenting with the texture, weight and balance of her materials, she creates an extremely delicate visual landscape that, by frustrating any attempt at interpretation, is highly intriguing.

Each composition is a unique arrangement of materials. Felt and looms are handmade and tailored to the artist’s choices, coffee filters bear the scars of wear and tear and no two sheepskins are ever the same. Bosquê focuses on the ‘thing itself’; her sculptures are present and require engagement.

The exhibition set-up is an informal reproduction of the artist’s working process and of her studio’s arrangement. The organisation of pieces in the space reveals the time they spent together during production – many of them were made simultaneously. Walking around the exhibition space is unsettling, the narrow distance between sculptures and the way they are balanced are finely calculated. There are no joins, screws or safety pins, and the negotiation with gravity and between each composition element is a well-fitted arrangement. Everything is balanced and only just right. By experiencing the exhibition, the visitor feels like a child in an antique shop, where everything is equally fragile and fascinating.

Bosquê has developed her artistic research and production around issues of materiality, structure and physicality in different media. Her sculpture work draws on a direct process of investigating matter. Her forms stem from the intimate relationship she builds with her materials and in response to their presence, as opposed to their function or representation. Her objects are often subtle assemblages and interventions with found objects, and she typically develops processes and techniques that are specific for each purpose. Knots, collages and castings are as fundamental for the composition as the choices of material.

— Fernanda Brenner