Patrícia
Almeida
Almeida
Inês Botelho
Lisboa, 1977
Lives and works in Lisbon
Although related to space, architecture and landscape, the work of Inês Botelho is eminently sculptural. Her technical exploration and challenging of materials such as lime, clay, wood and metal give results that are as precise as they are impossible.
Based on previously formulated designs and drawing on the experience and collaboration of traditional craftspeople, Botelho alters the qualities and physical states of raw materials in order to elude and subvert elementary universal phenomena and concepts such as mass, movement, shadow, gravity, orientation and time.
In drawing as in sculpture, her formal poetics are developed from actions based on vocabularies of geometry (line, reflection, transposition and rotation), architecture (wall, tent, plumb, stake and inhabitant) and geography (border, map, landscape and territory). Her works are drawings in space that are formalised as unusual proposals for interaction.
They call into question the paradigms of world order such as cosmic and planetary cycles, and destabilise the relational dynamics between people, objects and spaces, inducing an unrealistic perception of scale and perspective and undermining the notion of common space.
Text originally written for Google Arts & Culture apropos the exhibition “All I Want, Portuguese Women Artists from 1900 to 2020”, curated by Helena de Freitas and Bruno Marchand
