Before Hooves Grow considers the island as both a fantasy of escape and a site where isolation produces material change. Taking Madeira as its point of departure — historically imagined through narratives of abundance, cure, remoteness and reinvention — the exhibition places these projections alongside allopatric speciation, the evolutionary process through which geographically isolated populations gradually develop distinct characteristics.
Extending this process to the human body, the works imagine what prolonged isolation might produce: hooves adapted to steep terrain, or voices capable of travelling across mountains. Through this speculative evolution, the desire to escape and become otherwise is pushed towards an absurd conclusion: adaptation becomes so complete that departure may no longer be possible.
Snake in a cookie jar
(2023)
Location
Capela da Boa Viagem, Funchal
Dates
2022
Materials / media
Mixed fabric, aluminium, ropes
Photo Credits
Hélder Folgado
Snake in a Cookie Jar considers colour as a strategy of concealment: a surface that attracts attention while simultaneously obscuring what it contains. Taking its title from the imagined discovery of a snake inside a cookie jar, the exhibition uses this deliberately absurd encounter to examine seduction as a form of misdirection, and the unstable boundary between attraction and threat.
Drawing on ‘snake detection theory’ — the hypothesis that aspects of human vision evolved in response to the presence of snakes — the exhibition connects colour and perception to more primal mechanisms of attention, fear and survival. Across painting, textile and sculpture, colour operates less as decoration than as a lure: intensifying visibility while complicating what, exactly, is being seen.
Before Hooves Grow considers the island as both a fantasy of escape and a site where isolation produces material change. Taking Madeira as its point of departure — historically imagined through narratives of abundance, cure, remoteness and reinvention — the exhibition places these projections alongside allopatric speciation, the evolutionary process through which geographically isolated populations gradually develop distinct characteristics.
Extending this process to the human body, the works imagine what prolonged isolation might produce: hooves adapted to steep terrain, or voices capable of travelling across mountains. Through this speculative evolution, the desire to escape and become otherwise is pushed towards an absurd conclusion: adaptation becomes so complete that departure may no longer be possible.
