Flávia’s artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of body and spirit, matter and memory – a space where drawing, sculpture, engraving and poetry become ways of being and becoming. Rather than beginning with a fixed goal, each work emerges from a need, a curiosity, a desire to act on matter – and through it – with the body and memory, the senses and the soul, in a process of continuous transformation.
A central question animates her work: what comes first – the home or the path? This question doesn’t demand an answer, but it does fuel a journey. By getting physically involved with the materials – collecting and adapting fragments of trees from the river in Valada, engraving hand-moulded gesso tablets, drawing gestures that trace movement over time – Flávia discovers poetic spaces of encounter.
These moments, often unforeseen, seem like places of arrival: verses, images or shapes that reveal something essential, intimate and true.
Her practice rejects pre-existing images or external references. Instead, she embraces the tension between what can be represented and what resists representation. What is latent becomes visible – not as illustration, but as revelation. It is through the work of art that the truth of being is allowed to surface, the being of the artist and the being of the work itself. In this way, art becomes ‘the house of being’, the place that best understands this process of becoming, in its multiple possibilities.
But being, for Flavia, is not fixed. It is a journey through time, understood not as something segmented or linear, but as a lived duration. The artist who starts a drawing is no longer the same as the one who finishes it. The home and the path are not separate: the path is the home.
In 2020, during the pandemic, Flávia returned to her home village of Valada after 25 years living in Lisbon. By setting up her studio in the village square, she made her work visible to the local community, fostering new forms of relationship through openness, curiosity, and mutual support among everyone around her. Her ongoing collaboration with residents and friends reflects the development of a shared social and artistic space.
Emerging from this collective and place-rooted practice, a selection of large drawings and works engraved in gesso offers a meditation on presence, transformation and belonging – not as endpoints but as part of a continuous passage, where the artwork bears witness to the impossibility of separating house from path, arrival from becoming.