& Maria Fernanda Cardoso

"Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s work is currently in the USF Contemporary Art Museum exhibition, “Homing Devices.” Cardoso’s “Garden Of Insects” was constructed of stick bugs, grasshoppers, and butterflies. Maria’s Garden is very convincing but unexpected as being constructed from insects that look like sticks and leafs. Maria purchased the butter flies and the grass hoppers, but she bred the stick bugs. As a minimalist Maria’s techniques are clean and flawless.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso comes from a Colombian culture. Maria’s work is influenced by her environment of mass graves that are full of dismembered bodies. The soil is very rich from the swampland and is know for growing potatoes. Maria uses panty hose filled with dirt linked together representing a combination of potatoes and dismembered body parts. Within the panty hose, Maria would plant grass seeds and document the growth. In other work Cardoso uses flowers to represent death because walls surrounding the graves were full of fresh flowers. She also uses reptiles from her child hood that relate to the crown of thorns and the terrorism she was exposed to day to day. I find it interesting that Maria grew up surrounded by death and continues to use dead insect corpses in her work today.
Maria’s Colombian roots are very pronounced in her work and she uses a variety of exotic materials from these roots. Golden gourd are found in tombs and are still in use today as bowls. Cardoso uses the gourds as sculptural elements. She also creates sculptures with brown soap that is traditionally made from fat and ashes. Maria said the smell in bad when using the soap but it is good for the skin. When Maria moved to Australia she used sheep skin and emus skin. Cardoso says there is a market for every thing and you can buy anything. Maria felt unconnected with the animals she chose to use in her work so she worked with a butcher to skin the animal herself. It’s expected for some one to kill animals for food but Cardoso is a vegetarian. I am uncertain of the use of the animals’ bodies but Maria expresses her interest in the texture and surface qualities of the emus’ skin that is representational of landscape. Maria encouraged others to touch her work to feel the dry grass qualities of the emus."
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"“Characterised by the use of unconventional materials, Cardoso's work reveals her longstanding fascination with the natural world and the complexity of our relationship to it. Some of the works use the preserved bodies of frogs and lizards and dead butterflies, which are farmed for scientific and educational purposes. Others draw on dried sea creatures produced by the tourist industry as souvenirs of the seaside holiday, or in the case of the sea horses, are bred and used in Chinese medicine. These raw materials, with their potent symbolism, create works of great beauty, which recall patterns that exist in the natural world as well as minimalist sculpture, where simple elements are repeated to create more complex forms”.