Throughout summer 2021, The Portico Library helped to lead Manchester’s cultural recovery, bringing a groundbreaking installation of immersive sculptural and textile works by world-renowned Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno to the city. Accompanying Maria’s joyful, spectacular pieces, exhibited under the Library’s 215-year-old original Regency-period glass dome, was an evolving display of Library visitors’ own drawings created through posing and interacting with the original artworks.
Maria Nepomuceno’s expansive sculptures combine fluid, organic forms with vivid colours and traditional rope-weaving and straw-braiding techniques. They were shown alongside natural history books and archive materials from the Library’s 19th-century collection illustrating Manchester’s international and colonial connections during the city’s formative years. With spiral patterns evoking biological and spiritual themes, Maria’s brightly-coloured artworks brought the vibrancy of the natural world into the Library’s tranquil interior.
From 7th July to 29th September we welcomed a group of between one and twelve people to come and draw themselves and their fellow visitors posing among Maria's artworks. Afterwards, the participants were invited to add their completed drawings to the exhibition for other visitors to look at, and take a colour photocopy home with them. At the end of the exhibition, a book of all the originals was made and added to the Portico Library's collection for future generations to see.
The artworks
Using traditional and new techniques, Maria Nepomuceno has, since the early 2000s, developed a process of sewing spirals of materials including rope, beads and straw to explore the innumerable permutations of this adaptable form. Her sculptures and installations incorporate beads, ceramics and found objects. Often realised in carnival-bright colours, these works are chromatically, culturally and metaphorically rich, suggesting animals, plants, the human body and landscape, and ranging from the microscopic to the macrocosmic. Nepomuceno's fluid forms articulate space in a playful way, inviting tactile exploration.
Refloresta!
As we emerge from a devastating pandemic, Maria Nepomuceno asks us to remember the emergency of our time. Her exhibition’s title, Refloresta!, means ‘reforest’ in Brazilian Portuguese. It evokes the environment in which the artworks were conceived—Maria’s studio among the towering fruit trees of Rio de Janeiro—and her wish for the world to come together to reverse the deforestation still ravaging the globe. In a room and a city that bear the scars of industry—books blackened with Victorian soot and civic spaces devoid of wildlife—Nepomuceno’s organically shaped sculptures and the Library’s natural history books that accompany them remind us of what we could create: green, biologically diverse cities where multicolour life—and multicolour ideas—thrive.
Maria Nepomuceno
Maria was born in 1976 in Rio de Janeiro, where she continues to live and work. She has recently exhibited in the USA, Norway, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil, the UK, Germany, Sweden, France, Colombia, China and Japan. Using traditional and new techniques, Maria has, since the early 2000s, developed a process of sewing spirals of materials including rope, beads and straw to explore the innumerable permutations of this adaptable form. The rope as a connecting thread is as conceptual as it is literal in Nepomuceno's practice. In recent years collaboration has become a central factor in her work. She has worked with indigenous Huni Kuin people in the north of Brazil and has linked with community groups to realise projects for her exhibitions. This spirit of cooperation and openness continued at the Portico, where visitors’ own drawings were hand bound by conservators and volunteers into a new large-scale book for the Library’s archive—a record of the exhibition for future generations to enjoy.
Refloresta! was curated by James Moss with Apapat Jai-in Glynn.
Thanks to all the Portico Library’s staff and volunteers: Ang, Bel, Briony, Tim, Catherine, Lydia, Nicole, Martin, Teresa, Chan, Keith, Lou, Zack, Dorz, Emerson, Kristina, and to Helder Clara, Valeska Wittig, Alice Panton, Martin King, Kieron Finnetty, and Ray Cossins.
Images: Artworks by Maria Nepomuceno, 2011, ropes, beads, fibreglass, resin and ceramic. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. Photography: Andrew Brooks
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