Gomma Photography Grant 2023
Bone Foam
Photographer
Maria Oliveira
Bone Foam
22 Feb, 2024
I grew up in Minho, Portugal, in an empty place on top of a hill, between the thick fog and the open sun. I was raised by three women. This context laid the foundations for my identity. My references were based on the marked cycles of the seasons and the feminine universe. The women who generate, create, care for, kill and feed. The telluric and magical women, endowed with intuition and sensitivity to manage life and anticipate death. It is believed that women establish a maternal bond with what they create, be it children, plants or animals. The primordial act of feeding is a manifestation of love. From this geographical area I recover the connection with my ancestry, family, physical, spiritual; my heritage. Encounters coexist, human and nonhuman connections, memories, stories lived and told, the familiarity of animals, fog and running water. Bone Foam moves from an individual experience to a broader look at the need to connect to something bigger and outside of ourselves, be it our roots or the multitude of the universe. At this challenging time for humanity, the ability to connect with who we are, wherever we go, seems fundamental to me.
About the photographer
Maria Oliveira
Born and raised in Ponte de Lima and living in Porto, Portugal. Through photography she has been working on umbilical places, physical and mental. She’s interested in its mutation, the close relationship between human and the remaining nature, where’s include people, animals, the cycles of the seasons and how everything communicates, is related and exists together. From a poetic and symbolic perspective, her work moves between the visible and the hidden. The reality, the memory, and the imagination. She exhibits regularly since 2011 in Portugal and abroad. In 2023 integrates the Municipal Art Collection of Porto. In 2022 she participates in the exhibition "NATURE FUTURE - Young European photography", organized by the French Presidency of the EU Council, in Prague and Berlin. With the series ‘To Wander the Sea’ she integrates an itinerant collective exhibition during 2021. In 2019 she participates in the first Porto Photography Biennial. Between 2016 and 2017 she is resident artist at ‘Ci.clo - Plataforma de Fotografia’ where she develops the project 'Saving fire for darker days’ which integrates an exhibition shown, among others, at ‘Centro Português de Fotografia’, in Porto, Portugal; Fotofestiwal, in Lodz, Poland and School of Visual Arts, in New York, U.S.A. In 2014 she exhibits at FotoRio Festival, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and in 2011 at ‘Casa de Portugal’, in Macau. In 2019 she was the winner of the ‘FNAC New Talents award’ and ‘Scopio Magazine International Photobook Contest’.
