Inês Miguel Oliveira
Visual ArtistInês Miguel Oliveira (Guimarães, Portugal) lives and works in London. She explores painting through its articulation with objects, poetry and sounds. Her paintings are riddled with narratives, brooding about the poetry of the mundane, the fragmentary nature of existence, the momentary, and self-analysis.
My work deals with intimacy, with the poetry of the everyday. (…) I aim to engage the viewer in my private world, inviting them in but not quite laying it all bare.
— Inês Miguel Oliveira
3 questions for Inês
Where in the world is the biggest systemic fault?
In our lack of resistance to capitalism. We allow life to be defined by work, for work to be the defining characteristic and the reason for relationships, forgetting that life is, above all, for living.
What would be the shape of an earthquake?
An earthquake can destroy everything in seconds. But for some reason I don't fear this earthquake. The one I fear is the silent earthquake, the one that starts off slow, timid, the one whose presence is obvious and free from embarrassment, but which we are unable to stop. When we notice it, it has already created a slip, an unfillable gap.
What should we protect?
Our values and beliefs, shaky and fragile when forced into conflict with the reality of the world. We seem to have very little, and it always seems so insistent on slipping away. It's hard to hold on to – we can't seem to find the right shape for our hands, it seems to be a liquid that insists on flowing through the spaces between our fingers – but I believe that, despite all the mishaps, it's possible to hold them safe in our hands.
How we met Inês
We ran an open call from the 24th of May to the 18th of June 2021.
We selected eleven projects that explore contemporary discontinuities using the medium of text, photography, illustration or drawing.
Charlie Morris submitted the project BloodshotbloodShot which was selected to be included and published in the first issue of chumbo — our printed magazine dedicated to creative research.