Lost (and Found) Artist Series: Sonia Gomes

Artland’s Lost (and Found) Artist Series focuses on artists who were originally omitted from the mainstream art canon or largely invisible for most of their careers. Sonia Gomes is a Brazilian artist whose reputation for her genre-defying sculptural work has been growing since 2015, when the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor invited her to be part of his Venice Biennale exhibition.

Sonia Gomes Moves Towards Art

Sonia Gomes is a 73-year-old Afro-Brazilian artist who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She is best known for her freestanding and hanging sculptures which she makes from found and gifted fabric, thread, and wire. Born to a black mother and white father in 1948 in Caetenópolis, a centre for the Brazilian textile industry, Gomes initially pursued careers in education and law. During this period, she found a creative outlet in drawing and customizing clothes. Her art career came later in life, however, when she started taking classes at the Guignard School of Art in Belo Horizonte. At the age of 45, in 1994, Gomes had her first solo show of abstract paintings in the Casa de Cultura de Sete Lagoas. However, it would take another decade before she would exhibit her sculptural works, the ones she has become famous for, often made from found or gifted fabrics.

Sonia Gomes and her sculptural works

Perhaps it is no surprise that Gomes, who was born in one of Brazil’s important manufacturing centres for textiles, felt naturally drawn to working with textiles. She combines everyday materials like driftwood, furniture, and wire, with secondhand textiles to create abstract sculptural works. With these pieces, she reclaims Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminized crafts. The narratives of long-marginalised women and people of colour are tied to Brazil’s historical trajectory through her assemblage works. “My work is black, it is feminine, and it is marginal. I am a rebel,” says Gomes.

There is a sense of the sacred in Gomes’s works, leading back to the sacred objects used in the spiritual practices of the African diaspora in Brazil. Her grandmother was a shaman, and as a child, she witnessed her performing rites. Then there is a dynamism and movement in the works which she attributes to Brazilian dance.
Always fascinated with the drawings of internal organs in science and biology books, and her work has a lot to do with her interior, with the hidden parts of the body, reflecting the tissues, vertebrae, cartilages and muscles.

For Gomes, the fabrics she receives carry with them the history of the people they belonged to. She then adds a new significance to them as she incorporates them in her assemblages. She explains: “When I construct each work—for example, a sculpture, specifically Maria dos Anjos, that’s made of a wedding dress, so this work only exists because this wedding dress arrived. It already came with that appeal. It doesn’t let that story end. The work only exists in function of the material that comes to me. I didn’t look for it to make a particular work. They arrive. And sometimes there’s such a responsibility to that, that the material is stored for a long time.”