PAULA DO PRADO

Do Prado is a Uruguay-born artist living and working on Gadigal and Bidjigal land. Her practice draws on multi-layered connections to her Charrúa, Iberian and West African Bantu-Kongo heritage, working through the Abya-Yala concept of cuerpo-territorio-espíritu (body-land-spirit) and sentipensante (feel-thinking) pathways. Through large-scale textiles, do Prado weaves together a rich visual language of vibrantly coloured motifs and figures drawn from Indigenous cosmology and mythology, exploring the relationships between lands of the Southern Hemisphere, from plants and waterways to the movements of the stars.

Working with various forms of tejido (weaving), this body of seven new works, twelve months in the making is rooted in a 2023 trip to Uruguay where do Prado spent time with her paternal family and their ancestral river, Rio Cuareim, along the Uruguay-Brazil border. Having previously known the river only through her father’s recollections, connecting with it in person was a transformative experience. The resultant works represent riverine life forms existing between land and water, in which hybrid animal forms are layered with references to the Southern Cross, the Milky Way and cellular mitochondrial structures, moving between the micro and the macro, and between the deeply personal and the cosmological.

The exhibition title brings together the Charrúa word oyendau, meaning memory, and the concept of the cosmic sense of life as expressed in the writing of Brazilian Indigenous writer and activist Ailton Krenak. Together, they speak to do Prado’s ongoing work to restore relationships with the more-than-human world, and to the humbling reminder that we inhabit not only the earth, but the cosmos.