Alice Almeida
I’m Alice Almeida, and I’m a Portuguese artist. I currently work with printing techniques such as linocut, applied with collages, drawing and embroidery. In my work I create female figures in order to protect them from finitude, with the thought that at least they will resist illness, decay and death.
What motivates me most in technical terms is experimenting with various techniques in dialogue with engraving. I’m very interested in using this ancient technique in a contemporary environment, being able to mould it to my needs and make it more and more present today.
I started working with printmaking at the end of the first year of my degree, about six years ago, and at the time I didn’t realize the diversity of techniques it could involve. But while I was doing my Master’s degree I felt the urge to reconnect with this side of things, so I started by doing etching on acrylic bases, and then moved on to linocut. Since then I’ve prioritized linocut because I feel a greater connection and sense of “body” when I carve these bases, as well as their malleability for prints on different materials.
Craft projects
Rotura
This work is part of a series of linocuts called “Rotura”. In this series I decided to explore the idea of the transition to a post-mortem state, in which the soul separates from the physical body, moving somewhere we don’t quite know where, perhaps to “a window that overlooks nothing” (Borges, 2003, p.116), to an abyss. We see two bodies separating, the physical and the soul, and at their junction we find this future nothingness.
Mime
This work is part of a triptych called ‘Mime’. Touch becomes the sense most used when cutting linoleum. During this process it is almost mesmerizing to see the work of the hands, a tacit conversation, a mime between them and the linoleum. In this triptych, we see how the hands communicate with each other to create a work, we see the result of their dance.
Although each work is made from the same base, I alter it a little in each print, and in this one I’ve removed most of the paint from it.
Corpos Tocados
These prints were created as part of the collective exhibition of the annual “12X12” festival, where artists are challenged to create works in the format of a CD cover.
I started from one of the themes that attracts me the most: fragility. These female bodies are trapped in time, they don’t evaporate, they don’t die, they don’t change, thus escaping time, which inevitably brings us back to death: “The certainty of death is therefore given to us in the structure of the temporality of existence: we are temporal…” (Borges, 2003, p.133)