Ready to be dazzled?
A major new exhibition featuring the work of
Joana Vasconcelos is on display at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which recently reopened. Chris Bond met the Portuguese artist.
Pictures by James Hardisty.
the case with her Pop Rooster. This ninemetre high sculpture combines handmade ceramic tiles and LED light technology, to create a contemporary pop art statement which celebrates the rooster of Barcelos – Portugal’s most popular piece of traditional pottery. At dusk, the rooster becomes animated by 15,000 LED lights that illuminate the landscape.
Vasconcelos’s work in the Underground Gallery is equally intriguing, including the 12-metre-long Valkyrie Marina Rinaldi hanging suspended from the ceiling, one of a series of works that represent “valkyries” – female figures from Norse mythology.
Then there are oversized the silver stilettos of Marilyn made from stainless-steel saucepans. “It’s a connection between the traditional role of the mother as the cooker, the cleaner and wife, and the modern woman who is expected to be all these things and also go out to work and at the same time be sensual. How do you combine all that? I don’t know, but it’s an issue for women today.”
In her Call Center installation, Vasconcelos plays with ideas of strength and power by creating a giant Beretta pistol comprising 168 old-fashioned rotary-dial telephones. “I like taking domestic objects and taking them beyond normal use and what you expect from them,” she says.
This gets to the nub of what all good art does, which is to make us look at something familiar in a completely different way. “It’s not magic but it can have a magical effect to take the viewer beyond what you imagine something could be. You can take something like a shoe, or a chandelier, and when you look more closely you see something else.”
Her desire is to provoke a response through her work. “Someone might say, ‘what a lovely chandelier’ and then they look closer and go ‘oh my God, those are tampons’. The only thing I want to happen with my show is for people to feel something, even if they don’t like it, because then they are at least talking about it.
“If you are a man or a woman, or young or old, you relate to it in a different way. But it’s not up to me to decide how you react, it’s up to me to give you a window of opportunity to relate to the world in a different way. That’s what I do. I open windows so you can look into the world from a different angle.”
Vasconcelos is at the peak of her powers right now and understands the transforming power of art. “We are the only species that tries to represent itself so that in the future people will know that we were here. Some of us write, some of us paint and some of us sing, because without representing ourselves we will never exist in the future, and that’s what we’re doing. It’s a collective role and we are all part of this process,” she says.
“The rule of art is to represent the world in which we live, and to keep on giving hope to people and to encourage the world to keep on evolving.”
The Joana Vasconcelos exhibition runs until January 3, next year.