It takes creativity to cook, to work, to be in a relationship, to live. Lidia Lisbôa was born in Vila Guarani, a community in the countryside of the state of Paraná, near the city of Terra Roxa, Brazil, and has been reinventing herself ever since. You also have to be creative to make things come to life. Her artistic research often unfolds in a sensitive reconstruction of memory and of a body prior to the present moment, exploring multiple media, such as sculpture, drawing, installation, and performance, in an expanded understanding of what sewing is.

Birth and transformation are recurring themes in her works, whose titles include words such as “womb” and “cocoon.” In the series Tetas que deram de mamar ao mundo [Breasts That Nursed the World] (2015-2025), Lisbôa pays homage to breastfeeding women with gigantic monuments to motherhood itself. Large breasts, of different colors, in which humanity finds itself again. They are voluminous crochet pieces that establish a territory of active welcome, from where life continues to gush forth: strong, warm, and different. The Tetas que deram de mamar ao mundo are also multiple and strange bodies that exceed themselves, inseparable members of the world.

The scraps emerge and plunge back into a network of close knots, made to be seen. The mend is the highlight here. More than that, just as mothers give their milk to babies and thus share with them life in its essence, the patch here is the reason for and origin of all the work. It’s impossible to know where one fabric ends and the others begin, but there are differences between them. The bands colored in skin tones – egg yellow, orange and clay brown, silver, blood red, flesh pink – hold their differences, are bound together. They support and form the chest through which one strand of itself, which touches the ground, and four others, which remain suspended, flow toward the earth.

The naturalness with which the artist expands the fabric of the material shows in her gesture the dimension of an everyday experience that she articulates uniquely. By weaving stories instead of narrating them linearly, she reverberates common anxieties, fears, and desires, often hidden or concealed by society. In this way, she makes sewing a choice, a strategy for survival, for recovering herself, and for building memories. Whether in installations, ceramics, or drawings, Lisbôa’s works insistently extend her own political, sensual, and artistic body, constituting a presence that spreads and unreservedly occupies the space around her.