“As an artist, the surrounding environment is always my starting point for the creation of new work. My work is about memory and the scars that time leaves on matter, therefore I explore, compulsively, the textures and history of a given place. In this phase of my artistic production, my projects usually start with an immersion in personal memories, in my own history, in my own objects, transposing then to newly found vessels. My search for history, for patterns and textures will be at the same time the foundations of my work and an exercise of personal repositioning. The work is guided by its process and experimental character, developing itself around the dissolution of images, something that leads me to explore matter by its layers. The final result is, then, transcribed as an archive/atlas of process and material experiences and presented as a cabinet of curiosities where I too exhibit my thought process.”

The Mupi Gallery opens this month, on 11 May, another exhibition of the emerging artists platform Floating Islands, curated by Isabel Trabulo and Carmo Osul, this time with Alexandra Rafael. The artist work deals with the concept of action as emotional and/or material transformation, supporting and dragging in her drawings both the weight of her memory and the fragility of its construction.

Bio
Alexandra Rafael
Born in Coimbra | Portugal | 1990
Printmaking artist based in Porto, Portugal. She holds a MA in Drawing and Printmaking from Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, where she developed a research about transfer processes to printmaking surfaces. Since then she has been working as an independent artist, updating her research in her artistic work and participating in several exhibitions and artistic residencies around the country.