Vanessa da Silva & Maya Weishof: May Your Mouth Contain the Shapes of Strange Words

May Your Mouth Contain the Shapes of Strange Words is a duo exhibition of artists Vanessa da Silva and Maya Weishof, accompanied by a text written by Valentina Buzzi.

Vanessa da Silva (b. 1976, São Paulo, Brasil) is an artist based in London. Da Silva’s work focuses on migration, identity, displacement and belonging, spanning a range of media including, sculpture, installation and performance. The inextricable link between the body and the sculptural is at the core of Da Silva’s practice, with the artist’s own figure entwined with the making of her amorphous organic forms. The artist’s practice frequently involves a process of carving sculptures concurrently, reacting to the forms intuitively as she works into their surface materials. Influenced by research into the politics of movement, many of her sculptures appear to oscillate between figuration and abstraction, fluid and solid. Constantly shape-shifting, the forms evoke an ongoing state of metamorphosis or transformation. It is the sense of movement inherent to the shapes of her sculptures that implicitly interrogates fixed notions of identity or rootedness.

Maya Weishof (b. 1993, Curitiba, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. The artist works mostly with painting while simultaniously treating the body at work as a matter and as a visual and sensory possibility, which leads her to look for experimentations of different languages, formats, invoices and supports in painting that are assimilated with a sculpture thought. The paintings sprout from drawings she makes of memories, invented situations or sometimes images that dialogue with the history of art. Situations where the body is in a place of falling, sliding, deformation are recurrent. The artist seeks a juxtaposition of things - clippings, three-dimensional objects, processes of alteration and deformation of the image, are things that escape the attempt to establish a linear or closed narrative in her production.