From a nuisance to art: Carol Ambrósio turns household objects into a reflection on the feminine traduzido por: OPENROUTER

Before explaining what the totems of the Garden of Truths are, it is worth saying what they are not: quiet. Tall, made of foraged ceramics, stacked to the limit of each column, they rise in the garden of Maria Fernanda Marques at CASACOR São Paulo with a presence that is hard to ignore. Carol Ambrósio tells the assembly process casually: "I kept stacking and stacking, then at one point it started to fall. I said: well, that's enough. That was all it could hold".

(Bob Wolfenson/CASACOR)

Carol grew up going to the little MASP fair from the age of twelve. Her father owned an antique shop — one of those that accumulate trinkets, little plates with gallant scenes, period porcelain and objects that someone once decided were beautiful and later decided were no longer so. She grew up among them, without knowing that her eye was also being shaped there.

(Divulgação/CASACOR)

She kept all of this in the back of her mental repertoire and went on to work with fashion, where she remained for eighteen years. She worked with antique laces, fabrics with history, pieces that had passed through other hands before hers — a process that, she admits, "felt like a collage". The technique would reappear, in another guise, in her work later on.

A book, an idea

(Divulgação/CASACOR)

At some point between fashion, a move to Canada, a marriage, children and a season in China, Carol bought a book. She doesn't quite know why. The images bothered her — women inserted in landscapes as if they were part of the scenery, female bodies merged with decoration, the domestic, nature. "The images bothered me. I started gluing many objects on the women's heads". She looked at the collages and realized that the woman blended with household utensils, associated with the role of serving. "That was a place of voicelessness", she sums up. The discomfort, she later discovered, would be the raw material for her work.

The pandemic arrived and with it a sequence of losses that accumulated during a period of isolation. Carol was surrounded by pieces she had brought from her father's antique shop, and, without much of a plan, she began breaking ceramics, rebuilding them and stacking them. "Art came in this place of expressing myself. The work came first and the understanding came later".

(Divulgação/CASACOR)

The little plates with gallant scenes — women in gardens, women at soirées, women being watched — began to receive tigers, leopards, panthers. "Every time I saw a little plate with a gallant scene, I put a tiger on it. Because I couldn't stand seeing the woman that way anymore". The animals here take on the same reading as the women on the plate, except that "these animals had to shout much louder to be heard".

(Divulgação/CASACOR)

The logic of the stacked columns came from the same root. Head and body never perfectly aligned; objects that rise to the breaking point; the woman who holds all the little plates until she can no longer. Humor arrives unannounced, even in the face of the CASACOR 2026 theme, "Mind and Heart". "I like to play with words. There's this thing about the heart being distant from reason. My work has a lot of symbolism of the head, which is where ideas come from. And the head is not always connected to the body".

At CASACOR, the totems from the Verdades series occupy Maria Fernanda Marques' garden among native plants and flowers. There is something precise about this location: they are objects that were born to live inside homes — in display cabinets, in china cabinets, on living room shelves — which, here, have been installed outside, in broad daylight. Carol collects traditional ceramics that come to her with stories already accumulated from other homes and breaks, rebuilds, and stacks them. In an exhibition dedicated to dwelling, she brings outside precisely what the home usually keeps with the most care.

(Divulgação/CASACOR)

Carol's works are now part of the inaugural collection of the CASACOR Institute. She, who already has pieces in museums, receives the news with the same calm with which she speaks of everything: "Someone connected with my work and is going to take good care of it. And from this, this work can circulate in some other way, creating new dialogues." What interests her, deep down, is not the place, but what happens when someone stops in front of a piece and remembers a memory of their grandmother, or associates a panther with power, or simply finds it strange. "Art is largely made by the gaze of the other. The artist is there thinking one thing, but the other's gaze goes down another path. I have no control over what people will do with it. That's part of the charm."

(Divulgação/CASACOR)

Carol is in a new phase now. While she decides how, the garden totems remain standing at Parque da Água Branca until August 9, when the exhibition closes its doors to the public. The discomfort, she assures, has not passed. It has only changed objects.

traduzido por: OPENROUTER