Featured Artist Patricia Gurgel-Segrillo

Featured Artist Patricia Gurgel-Segrillo is a native Brazilian, now living and working in Ireland. She talks about her journey and her diverse portfolio. Visit Patricia’s website for more information.

 

 

I started drawing from the age of 5 and carried on drawing ever since, later learning and practicing a diverse range of disciplines (i.e. painting, film animation, hat design etc), until eventually defined jewellery-making as my main practice 25 years ago. It’s been always my goal, whatever I did: to be my own boss and to work from home, as I do, in an experiment to have work/life mingle as much as possible. So far it’s been positive in both.

 

For my young daughter to see a healthy, creative and empowered relationship with work (which unfortunately is mostly the exception when I look around) might be my greatest legacy.

I try to blur the boundaries of Design – Craft – Art. Good thought and good design should go into each piece. The hand-crafted aspect and the skill which it requires as well as my artistic expression- all three are important to me.

 

Integrity and kindness runs throughout all I do: from answering emails to my overall attitude towards the commercial aspects of my practice as well as gentleness towards myself. The physical demand of actually making can shorten the time one will be able to do it full-time, if attention and respect isn’t given to one’s body.

 

 

 

I work with fine silver. Its softness is a crucial quality needed for the main weaving technique I developed. The one thing I LOVE about my work: no piece is exactly the same, EVER! It is the nature of the contemporary jewellery ‘woven series’: the state I’m in is reflected in the piece, which is maybe an expensive ‘mood thermometer’ for me but a wonderful incentive to search for balance!

 

 

Recently I’ve started working also on a series of drawings, something I’ve always set aside as something “to do after retiring” whatever that means… That plan always had a lovely green Irish landscape as a backdrop (I have dual citizenship: Brazilian and Irish, have grown up in Brazil but never lived in Ireland). However, after the sudden loss of a dear close friend and knowing his dreams and aspirations, several of which, just like mine, were relegated to later- it dawned on me the senselessness of that plan. So the drawings start bubbling up- driven by deep-rooted questions on cross-cultural identity, womanhood, self-sufficiency and empowerment.

 

I live in Cork, Ireland now.

I’m working at the moment on three areas:

- A contemporary jewellery group for an exhibition in Vilnius, Lithuania(Galerija Meno Niša) and another group for a gallery in Cork City (Designworks Studio).

- Continuing the drawing series about Human Rights which was set in motion by a call to submit artwork for an exhibition at the Picture Art Foundation, Redondo Beach, California. I was fortunate enough to have two of my drawings chosen.

- Recently I’ve resumed a collaboration with the wood artist Garvan McGrane. More of the objects series in birch multi-ply and float glass are in the making.

 

 

My father’s love of books and art and his view that being an artist was indeed a dignified activity still nurtures me with much inspiration.

Artists who “speak” mainly through metal, or in black and white are my obvious top influences, as well as the great photojournalism masters and their humanity. But my inner landscape was certainly composed by an early love of reading and by “realismo magico” literature and its richness of fantastic imagery. It is most interesting to me, in the very way it is dissimilar to surrealism, as it proposes magic not as contained in a separate, subconscious world but within ordinary life.

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