Quinha Faria

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I am interested in what happens when painting becomes a material system that the body must negotiate. Painting is an unstable system. For me, painting continually negotiates the conditions of its existence. I choose materials within my proximity, including hospital supplies, plumbing tubing, sisal twine, linens, and construction materials. I get to know materials through touch, repetition, failure, limitation, and attention to their inherent qualities. Their physical capacities shape the work alongside my intentions and from there, a relationship develops. I build structures that depend on and expose their conditions of support. I carve into plywood panels, weave shredded textiles, and construct suspended networks. The works hold together provisionally, allowing for collapse, compression, tension, resistance, and reconfiguration. Instability becomes part of how the work operates. Through these structures, I explore how support, permeability, pressure, and restraint are experienced through the body and how systems adapt under stress. My understanding of these relationships is grounded in a background in emergency nursing, human physiology, and custom tailoring. Working at the bedside for twenty years, I developed an understanding of bodies and systems under pressure. I bring this bodily intelligence into the studio, where knowledge develops through contact between my body and the materials with which I work. Making becomes a way of thinking through how structures hold,...

Artwork