Lucia Nogueira

In conversation with William Furlong

from Audio Arts Volume 12, Number 1, 1992

Transcript

William Furlong: There are a number of pieces placed on the floor, and the one we’re looking at is a galvanised bucket with red fabric tubing coming out of it. Perhaps we could start by talking about this piece?

Lucia Nogueira: This piece is basically a pipe made of silk, filled up with sand. It is connected with previous work I’ve done with elements like tubes or holes. I did a tube running from a storage room and then coming through the gallery in a straight line and getting completely tangled up in a hessian sack; and then again a very determined straight line goes inside a bucket and then gets muddled up again and then at the end there is nothing there. It’s not filled, it’s just resting on that frame.

WF: The elements in the exhibition seem to have a sense of interior tension.

LN: It’s a tension in that you don’t know where it starts and where it ends. For instance, this silk pipe you don’t know what’s in it. It goes in that sack and the sack suggests a place where one keeps things. Then it goes inside a bag and the bag suggests something that carries liquid. It’s like a vicious circle; there is no beginning or end. And this applies to most of the pieces. For instance, this piece is an old box that I found, and a rubber pipe. It suggests that something’s inside that box. And the rubber pipe again is a kind of connection between the inside and the outside. It just hangs there very comfortably. And in a way all these elements are like the metal mercury that can go up and down; it’s like a mediator, and it’s always in my work, this kind of power that the mercury has, and the work looks like it’s not finished, in a way.

WF: You use mercury in another work…

LN: Yes, I did at the Chisenhale Gallery. I made an installation there with two man-sized gas pipes and then opposite a tiny little mercury switch. And the switch had the same kind of value as the gas pipes, in terms of power, of energy.

WF: You use elements of the real world.

LN: It’s things that I see on the street, things that I have in my studio… it accumulates in my head and when I start making the work, I actually don’t know what’s going on and I can’t digest it. And then after about a year I know more or less what that thing was about. But basically it’s impressions of things that I see on the streets all the time, like photograph shots, you know, in your head.

WF: Is the starting point the observation of things you come across, or are they thought about in a more cerebral way before you create the form?

LN: Both, in fact. But there comes a point within the development of the work that everything you thought about goes behind and the impressions come through and take over.

WF: Is this an installation where there’s a very strong interaction between the pieces when you install them?

LN: I couldn’t just finish in my studio and say, OK, I’ll do that in the gallery, because I had to consider the space. My work is never finished in the studio.

WF: You came from Brazil to England in 1975. Do you think your background enters this work?

LN: I’m sure the process of work is connected with my background. The way of thinking is very much from Brazil and also the way of choosing, the way of picking up objects… it’s something connected with childhood. Brazil is not linear like a European country. You have a linear thought. In art, you have a very rich background of art history, and we don’t have that in Brazil, not of visual arts. I think the way we developed our visual sense is different from the Europeans because we were not taught at schools about art like you are here. You do everything in a very empirical way, even art.

WF: A lot of Western contemporary art has a stylistic unity, whereas the work here has a stylistic disunity. But there is a conceptual unity to do with the combination of opposites.

LN: Because we didn’t have schools, the contemporary Brazilian artists somehow invented something.

WF: How do you feel your work relates to this European context?

LN: My work has a mood of being from another place. Most of my work is about urban lives. It’s very much the sense of those things that you find on streets, which are expressions of people's behaviour and thoughts. It’s very much from London, actually, this work, but because I’m from Brazil, the mood’s different. Some people think that there is a kind ritual about my work. Maybe there is, but I never thought of ritual when actually making it.

WF: Is it important to you that it does have a correspondence with your everyday?

LN: I think if you are making art, everything one does is a bit dictated by what you find around you… things that somehow connect with what you are, those things you’ve read. It’s a melting pot, and in the end it comes out something else. It’s a kind of obsession with visual elements you find. I think the best part of making art is encountering those very mundane and silly things that you find around, no?

WF: I raise the issue of a discourse arising out of the fact that you’re Brazilian: is there any parallel discourse to do with you being a woman?

LN: Good question. I honestly don’t know. Some people say that my work is very much a woman's work. But I don’t think it really matters in the end, you know. I think what matters is the work.

WF: I wonder whether there is some sort of autobiographical experience coming through the work?

LN: I sometimes think that my work is all about gaps. You have a linear routine in your life that carries on, and then suddenly something happens and it breaks the line. I think my work is very much connected with what happens when the line is fractured. I think everybody, men and women, has passed those gaps, it’s part of life, you know, it’s part of being human. And I think my work’s very much connected with that gap. It raises questions and it stirs things. I sometimes think my work is about someone who’s a foreigner, too. Because when one is a foreigner one has to be completely alert all the time. If you are living somewhere else, it doesn’t matter how long you live there, it’s like being on a tight-rope all the time. But it’s quite nice, you know, because it makes one think all the time. It’s a big challenge to be a foreigner. It’s great, I think.

WF: Some of the unresolved issues in the work maybe correspond with the unresolved relationship with where you are living.

LN: I’m sure there is some kind of connection there. Not only with the place where you are, but with the place you come from. Because you left, you didn’t resolve things there either, so, in fact, you are at the middle. But I think it’s quite healthy to be like this, you know. For long, long time I’ve been living between two completely different cultures, you know; it’s being like an exile more or less. And I think there is a connection there, you know, I think so.