aromas de urze e de lama/ scent of heather and mud (2008)
These mixed media drawings were made in 2007-8, based on photographs taken in 1979-80 in a rural parish in the Alto Minho province of Portugal, where my then husband, João de Pina Cabral, was doing the fieldwork for his doctoral thesis in social anthropology. He subsequently published his work as a monograph.
This was one of the most alienating times of my life – newly married, I felt myself thrown into a community in a passive role, and being quintessentially an urban creature, from – and in – a foreign country, I felt estranged and vaguely hostile. I’m possibly lacking in empathy, and being that close to earthy smells frightened me.
But I was glad to be able to put the snapshots to some use decades later. Anxiety recollected in tranquility! The drawings were made in 2008 in a cottage, where my second husband Ian and I were staying while the house we were having built was being completed: an exciting time. The drawings were published in João’s book, Aromas de Urze e de Lama, Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2008, and they were exhibited at the Ethnographic Museum, Lisbon in 2008.
Exhibition Aromas de Urze e de Lama, Museum of Ethnography, 2008.