Isabel Carvalho works with drawing, painting, performance and text; the book as an artistic medium as well as writing and publishing are key components of her artistic production.
Carvalho’s most recent complex of work was inspired decisively by her reading of Tropismes, a meticulous prose study of interpersonal “movements under stimulus” (this is the physiological definition of the term ‘tropism’) published by writer Nathalie Sarraute in 1986.
The artist undertakes a complex investigation into the implications of movement – the individual’s impulses, reactions and associations, and self-reflecting subjectivity. In the spirit of a “movement in a new direction”, Carvalho went on a journey to North Africa to collect associations in dialogue with the foreign continent and its culture, bringing back typical elements and materials to Berlin, to associate them with local materials in their turn.
In Künstlerhaus Bethanien Carvalho is now presenting a number of such materialised associations and permeations: filigree ceramic objects, a sequence of abstract drawings, and an installation made from small-format acrylic panels with her own engraved poetic sentences: all these elements are residues of a journey that develop into the geography of a nomadic experience.