Ancient Gestures
Maria Teresa Franco’s sculptural oeuvre is grounded in an understanding of form as it evolves, dissolves, and transforms. Franco, an Oeiras, Portugal-based sculptor takes everything familiar to us about the past and twists our perception to allow us to reflect on our future. Concentrated on current models of instant gratification and wastefulness, Maria Teresa Franco turns to remnants of history to confront humanity’s habits. Franco’s sculptures fossilize and preserve traces of life as we know it. They are marks of mankind disguised as ancient gestures but in reality are eternal, altering in shape and form throughout time.
Part One: Who is Maria Teresa Franco?
Question One: Who are you?
I must say I’m a curious mind. A person who seeks constant learning and self development. I’m driven by creative and motivated people that give space for the unknown.
Question Two: Who are you as an artist?
As an artist I have a constant necessity of creating and at the same time the need of a ponderate meditation over my work. I use the Human being as my main focus.
Question Three: What kind of journey are you on?
I have made a bachelor degree in Sculpture to widen my creative horizons and to confront myself with questions I didn’t even know existed. I’m now about to start a masters in Management in order to get to action and to have an impactful presence in the cultural world creating awareness of its fundamental role in our societies while making it possible to continue my own art projects.
Question Four: What is in your artwork that we cannot see?
Probably the way it reveals itself to me throughout time. There is a dialogue created between me and my artworks throughout my meditations and in many cases the artwork transforms itself without others knowing it. Writing is a medium I always use in my art process but usually don’t share with others.
Question Five: What is something art has taught you?
Art keeps on teaching me new things and I believe it’s a constant self growing process. But one thing I believe in is that it has to be honest.
Question Six: What is something strange or interesting you keep in the studio/workspace?
A Mirror.
Part Two: Traces of Time
What is your artistic practice?
I spend half the time observing,writing and drawing and the other half in action in my studio. Living in a time where everything is disposable, where people get used to the idea of instantaneous, the essential gestures of life get discarded or at least remain silent to the eye of the people that live along with the velocity of my generation. These interhuman relations and expressions that are taken as guaranteed are however, from my point of view, in a path to extinction. In my work I expect to create an analogy between times using the idea of fossil and archaeology emphasizing the human being as subject and the touch as a metaphor. I relate matter with time and with traces, which in my work is related to traces of human action.
Ceramics
2019
An art installation made from fingerprinting on clay. Time becomes quantity and quantity becomes scale. Still from a formal approach to archaeology, this installation opens itself to a constant possibility of transformation of scale and form.
white stoneware.
Wood. 3,8m X 3,42m X 2M. 2019
A public sculpture made for the Oeiras municipal garden. A dynamic and engaging sculpture, accompanying the field lines of an archaeological research, was born around some old concrete shoes I found that revealed more about its place history.
13cm X 12.5cm X 7.5cm | Stoneware | Engobe and Glazed in “Grês de Sal” technique and 7cm X 14cm X 16cm | Stoneware | Glazed in Grês de Sal . 2018
A set of studies I made while meditating on the idea of an eternalized touch, in a formal approach to fossils, giving it great value in the means that human physical and social relationships are in my point of view in the path to big transformations because of the technological evolution and the environmental changes.
The absence becomes presence.
Where/ How can Vacant Museum viewers see more of your work and where can they purchase it?
You can see more of my art works at https://zikafrancoart.wixsite.com/meusite or at my IG page : @zikafrancoart