Vanessa da Silva

Born and raised in São Paulo, da Silva has lived in London since the early 2000s. Her work explores nationality, identity, migration and displacement, reflecting her own experiences as a Latin American immigrant to the UK. Working across sculpture, textiles, installation and performance, da Silva’s practice interrogates ideas of both cultural and transactional exchange, as well as notions of trade and value. Interweaving the personal with the political, she investigates the amalgamation of different histories and cultures in the development of her identity.

 

Carved into foam and then coated with fibreglass and pigment before being sanded down, Inner Landscapes (Floating Head) evokes the contours of a human skull. Da Silva’s intuitive approach to composition results in organic forms that make reference to the inner architecture of the body. Although abstract, her work explores elements of figuration via the choreography of human behaviour, in particular the way we travel through the world. Many of da Silva’s sculptures are interactive, emphasising the inextricable link between body and movement.

 

Set within the cubic framework of the Box, Inner Landscapes (Floating Head) is suspended against a backdrop of tiled cut outs from cardboard packing cartons. These boxes, found discarded outside local shops by her studio in Hackney, feature the logos of products imported from the tropics. Da Silva’s work frequently probes colonial attitudes to non-Western cultures, particularly the commodification and fetishisation of so-called exotic exports. As a Brazilian artist in London, she is preoccupied with ideas of belonging and associated cultural signifiers. The sculpture’s fabric tongue is stuffed with black beans, a widely used ingredient in traditional Brazilian cooking.