One of the nine wooden sculptures that resulted from Ângela Ferreira's work in Lisbon, in 1989, spending her sabbatical year of professor in South Africa as a guest artist at the Ar.Co's department of sculpture. The works she then exhibited were in continuity with her previous academic and artistic researches on objects taken from popular and urban culture. However, when moving to Portugal, she deals mainly with traditional objects from the rural world, not only because of their broad dimension, but also given her particular interest in the formal constitution of objects. Through drawing, she studied and depurated these forms and then shaped them with lamellate, a similar material to plywood, both light, ductile and malleable to all formal demands, and for that reason often employed by British sculptors as Richard Deacon or Tony Cragg, to whom the artist felt very close.

 

In spite of the chosen objects' configuration being determined by the purpose they served, Ângela Ferreira deconstructs them in the whole, and in that dissection seeks to find an alternative source for the order of forms. Such creative re-characterisation of the object produces a similar effect to the works of Martin Puryear, much admired by the Mozambiquean artist, whose forms are in the same limb, in the tenuous balance between being almost recognizable without reaching the point of abstraction – “my sculptures”, as declared Ângela Ferreira, “are in that sort of frontier between abstraction and figuration”.

 

AR