The second artist commission for our Sunley Gallery is Tempo para Respirar (Breathing Time) by Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno. Artists and makers from Margate took part in Nepomuceno's Studio Group and helped to create the piece, which is made up of donated rope from the community.
Inspired by traditional South American craft techniques, Nepomuceno weaves straw, strings and piles beads, and sews brightly-coloured ropes into draping coils and flower-like forms. These materials form a fantastical landscape, also populated by playful ceramic shapes, shiny over-sized beads and found objects.
This new work, Nepomuceno's most ambitious to date, brings a landscape of colour, sound and texture into our beautiful Sunley Gallery, which overlooks Margate seafront. Tempo para Respirar (Breathing Time) expresses the energy and colour of Brazil, but goes beyond the earthly, with spiralling forms and carefully balanced objects drawing on opposing forces, like movement and stillness, unity and division, contraction and expansion.
