Deliquesce

from Latin dēliquēscere to melt away, become liquid, from de- + liquēscere to melt, from liquēre to be liquid

“The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else - with the wind, an animal, human beings…
Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions”
(Deleuze & Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, 11)

Plants and weeds were collected from an artistic residency near the BioRia in Canelas, Aveiro during September 2023. A domestic iron is appropriated as a makeshift tool to extract the ink from a page of a vintage National Geographic magazine. Harnessing a process of frottage - the ‘raw material’ is extracted using heat and beeswax, and applied onto Japanese rice paper that has been placed on top of the leaf, root or vegetal matter. Inscribing a surface with positive or negative signs as a statement of presence creates a moment for someone to detect and interpret those traces. But presence and disappearance are in a constant dance.

Drawn to concepts and methods that derive from the fragmented image, my interest lies in combining them with an instinctive ‘brush’ stroke that manipulates the hierarchy of traditionally separate mediums (painting, printmaking, collage). Lately, it is also about the way we make rhizomatic connections and interact with our surroundings. Like fungi that slip through classification systems, the world becomes less of an ordered system, and more of a place of re-exploration. Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome pose an alternative to the hierarchical “tree” structure of power as a radical starting point toward rethinking the relationship between humans and the supporting biosphere. Rather than isolating nature to the symbolic order of structures of thought and polarities, there is an understanding of a perception of the vegetal world as a fundamentally symbiotic system of interrelations between roots, rhizomes and soil.

Each work can be viewed as a self contained exploration of an initial root, forming its own identity and structure but maintaining its core identity with the whole.