The Bush Inside or The Inner Forest
After spending time as artist-in-residence in a National Forest, I produced a series of drawings of the native plants of Brazil with sepia and blood red Chinese ink, on parchment paper. The images are created to be blurred when I throw coffee over them. Within this action there is an action of “doing” with the intention of “undoing”, the instant of risk, of transformation, of life and death. I reflect on impermanence. What is here tomorrow will not be here.
Coffee was one of the monocultures to take over our original vegetation, and in my work, it is the liquid that erases the representation of this forest. The size of the images is directly related to the size of my body and I link the papers that are attached nailed onto the walls to a shroud that guards the traces of memory. The papers are fixed with a certain distance which causes them to move, as if life still remained therein. The forest takes over the interior of the architecture.
When assembling the interior scene with reds and browns smeared across the drawings of plants lying on a bed, I am bringing to the sphere of intimate care, something grandiose: The memory of something lost and distant, the Garden of Eden. The sacred in the intimacy of a bedroom, on the bed where I slept for over twenty years.
Rosangela Dorazio 2019
