Minas Gerais Comes to Glasgow

I have now been living in Brasil for three years and thought that it was high time to pay a return visit to Scotland to see my family, friends and past footprints. It has been a surreal two weeks not least because I swam without a wetsuit in Loch Lomond and Loch Long basking in a heat that was almost tropical in its intensity. In thirty-five years, I have never known the icy waters of Scotland to be so warm. Equally surreal was to find in the Tramway Arts Centre, around the corner from my old flat, a site-specific installation by the Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa. The industrial dimensions of Tramway 2 lend themselves to epic works and exhibitions, and Pessoa’s Pilgrim Fields occupies the space through a sequence of sculptural works inspired by organic materials from both Scotland and her native Minas Gerais.  As the centre of gold extraction, iron mining, and steel production, Minas has played a key role in the economic and political history of Brasil. It is famed throughout the country for its agricultural produce, aged cachaças, and cheese, and is geographically and geologically spectacular. Mountains, serras, rivers, lagoons, waterfalls, caverns, rain forest, sertão, meandering red dust roads, iridescent ochre rock formations all of it speckled with flowers, primeval plants and every type of fruit and vegetable known to humankind. Solange brings elements of this  tropical universe to Glasgow that she merges with fragments of Scotland’s   rural landscape to create an abstract field of earth colours, textures and forms that evoke our prehistory and the human appropriation and transformation of the natural world. Across Tramway’s iron tracks and stone floor, under the northern light falling from the roof, she distributes seed pods, vegetables, and gourds, cast in bronze or fired in clay that are layered and fused with beds of sheep’s wool, kelp, hops, gravel, hay and dried flowers. She says that she doesn’t really like to explain her work. It is something to be experienced, a tactile sensual landscape that in her own words references the memory of a universal “lavoura arcaica e metafisica”, the ancient metaphysical tilling of the land.