THE VALLEY
Taos
118 Cam De La Placita
Taos, NM
FERNANDA MELLO
Fernanda Mello (b.1988, Cacoal, Rondônia, Brazil) is an internationally recognized self-taught artist who lives and works in Newburgh, New York. Her upbringing in the Amazon region of Brazil began a deeply personal search as an artist to share her enthusiasm for indigenous narratives that are highly sophisticated and interconnected with every aspect of life in the natural world.
In her childhood, Mello took part in several indigenous dance groups called Boi Bumbá, whose choreography represents tales of indigenous people versus colonizers versus the natural world. Amazonian people take immense pride in this dance tradition, especially during the time of her upbringing, reclaiming these practices from the northern part of Brazil, which is often exoticizedand discriminated against. Currently living in the United States, she reconnects with those childhood stories and choreographies again with new eyes through painting and other materialities.
In her work, Mello explores concepts of origin and interconnectivity, meditating on ecological cycles of life and death while she meticulously paints shapes that can be read as cellularorganisms, celestial orbs, chains of beads, pearls, or shells. These forms stem from the artist’s interpretations of the indigenous Yanomami's prophecy of the end of the world. The old prophecy says if the last Yanomami shaman dies, the sky will fall and that will be the end of the planet. Mello’s paintings often utilize these geometrical pearl structures that she refers to as "cells of humanity," both small and expansive, woven together into a structure to hold the sky together, willing it not to fall. With constantly changing shapes, colors, temperatures, waves and tides, these meditative geometries reflect ancestral values in a process of decolonization of the subconscious, and hold space as symbols of protection of indigenous traditions and ecological systems.