Dimensions: support: 294 x 208 mm
Copyright: © Helena Almeida | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: This is a drawing with pigment by Helena Almeida, currently held in the Tate Collections. There's something both delicate and unsettling about the stark lines and shadowed forms, almost like a half-remembered dream. What do you make of it? Curator: It feels like a visual poem, doesn’t it? Almeida often used her own body as a canvas, exploring themes of presence and absence. The repeated hands and the dark pigment pools...they almost read as gestures of creation and erasure, a push and pull. Does it evoke a sense of incompleteness for you? Editor: Definitely. The sketches feel fragmented, like pieces of a larger narrative. Curator: Perhaps the narrative is the act of drawing itself? Almeida invites us to consider the intimate connection between artist, body, and the mark. Editor: That's a compelling thought! It reframes my understanding of the piece completely. Thanks!
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/almeida-drawing-with-pigment-t13471
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This is one of thirty-eight drawings in Tate’s collection by Almeida, all of which are rendered in ink, pen and pigment on sheets of off-white A4 paper. Each sheet has four holes punched down one side, and a number of the sheets have drawings on both sides. The images consist of simple line drawings, overlaid with passages of dense pigment. Each depicts the artist’s body in whole or in part. Many detail her hands, often in the act of drawing. Other images show the artist’s legs, arms or torso, or show her performing an action: dragging an unidentifiable mass that is attached to her ankle by a rope, or pushing her prone body up from the floor.
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