SEMENTES MINI COLLECTION

SEMENTES, meaning seeds, came to me in a dream. The collection considers the many choices we encounter in life, each one a seed that, regardless of where it leads, must eventually be planted.

Each seed is carefully painted into a bed of earth pigments, with yellow and red ochres collected in my home state of Goiás, Brazil, and processed entirely by hand. Black, made from charred trees collected in Brasília, creates the dark, fertile ground from which the seeds emerge.

The seeds themselves are made from pigments derived from alamada-roxa flowers (Brazilian jasmine,) gathered from my family’s garden in Brasília. This particular pigment holds a deeply personal significance. The flowers came from a tree that was a favorite resting place of my late cat, Muxu. His unexpected passing brought with it a lesson in love and loss, trust in the unfolding of life, and gratitude for what is here while it is here.

In this flower pigment is where the surprise appeared. When wet, it showed as a deep, almost disappearing purple. As it dried, the color receded and transformed, eventually reappearing as a soft white. It became an unexpected meditation on presence, that something can seem to disappear without ever truly being gone.

The paintings are made with egg tempera, an ancient medium in which pigment is bound with egg. Across cultures and traditions, the egg has long carried associations with creation, renewal, transformation, and the mystery of life itself. Here, it serves a metaphorical sense, symbolizing the seed, the earth, the flower, and the egg, all holding the possibility of something not yet visible.

SEMENTES marks my first collection made with egg tempera and my first collection since returning to Brazil. It sets a major closing and opening of a cycle, and a return to the materials, landscapes, and beginnings from which I came.