Laura LimaIpupiara, 2023
Laura Lima’s practice draws deeply from Brazilian mythology, natural processes, and the mutable qualities of materials. Over the past two decades, she has worked across installation, film, textiles, and performance-related forms, weaving together philosophical inquiry with tactile experimentation. Her work often engages the passage of time and organic transformation inviting elements such as decay, discolouration, and disintegration to become active agents in shaping the work’s meaning and form.
Porosity and tension are central to Lima’s installations, where gaps in woven structures invite movement and contemplation. Viewers are encouraged to shift position, navigate space, and animate the performative charge that pulses through her environments. In this way, Lima dismantles passive viewing, replacing it with a heightened physical and perceptual awareness.
‘Ipupiara’ draws on the figure of a mythical sea creature from Brazilian folklore – a cannibalistic merman said to be half man, half sea lion, covered in fur and possessing a cat-like moustache. To kill, it suffocates its victims in an embrace. The female Ipupiara, by contrast, is described as beautiful, with long hair. Lima references this duality through a sculptural construction composed of raw cotton threads dyed with natural pigments – wine, hibiscus, turmeric, spinach, almond leaves, and more – interlaced with steel wire and wood. The resulting form is both alluring and unsettling, suggesting a body in tension, suspended between myth and matter, seduction and threat.
