Pieces to wear or to hang

I have been creating jewellery for as long as I can remember, since my early childhood. I would use anything I could find to create them, objects that I found in my garden, on the beach, or in my grandparents' attic: pebbles, shells, clay, wire, old toys, pieces of glass, or buttons, and screws... I loved making jewellery.

Creating these pieces was a totally intuitive and almost unconscious act. Necklaces, brooches, earrings, hair clips, each piece was unique, obviously original, because it was heavily dependent on the material I could find. As soon as the jewellery was finished I would hide them in a box, and only later, and only sometimes, I would offer them to my relatives.

I felt they looked unusual, sometimes even strange, I would never really wear them or even exhibit them, only to show them to really close friends within my artistic circle who would encourage me to continue and even ask me if they could wear some of the pieces on special occasions.Growing up, I experimented with incorporating more materials such as exotic tree seeds or antique beads, always dancing on a fine line of an act of creation that was at the intersection of a naive approach, brute techniques, with premier materials.

It was when I spent 5 years in Lisbon that I met Catarina Silva. Catarina is a jewellery artist and head of the jewellery department at the ARCO school in Lisbon. She taught me the basic and traditional techniques of jewellery making: sawing, soldering, setting stones, melting and making molds for metals from cuttlefish bones I would find on the shores of Comporta. I learned and practiced all these techniques. I started incorporating them to the materials I was using before. I now use both metal and papier-mâché, cardboard and gold leaves, shells, and semiprecious stones. All my jewellery pieces are unique, they complement my paintings and talk to each other.

Often, I find my inspiration for my jewellery in my paintings and vice versa. They speak about the Same themes. I seek to express conceptual ideas through them, It goes beyond just a decorative object to become a form of artistic expression in its own right. I lend my iewelery pieces a magical and protective symbolic power.