Walks in CQ Artwork

Mafalda Espirito Santo Soares Nunes is a Portuguese/South African Artist born in Madeira and raised in South Africa. Post-graduated in Contemporary Art at the State University de Minas Gerais, Brazil, Master in Fine Arts at the “Universidade Classica de Lisboa”. Mafalda acquired a multi cultural exposure and exhibited and worked extensively in Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Brazil, Portugal, Netherlands and Shanghai. She integrates her South African and Portuguese background with new cultural experiences in different continents and cultures resulting in unique and personal experiences, both as an artist/designer and a social worker. She participated and helped with various activities, including lectures, seminars, ateliers, and workshops. Art is an instrument of processing creativity. Therefore the game of forms and shapes all come naturally in her way of creating and transmitting. There is no specific style or an aesthetic but each project installs questions of different interpretations, each country requires a different approach. Years of experience and “ways of being” led her to chose and address a specific anthropological reality: society and culture of a city in Africa/Asia or a town in Europe and reach out to its multiple roots, institutions, communities connecting them to the outside world through art in its vast form. Combined with her painting, jewelery is also an important part of her journey. Jewelery to her is more than a decorative fashion item, it portrays various cultures and societies and its multiple functions: protections, worship, status, aesthetic, symbolic, beauty and power. She has previously exhibited her African – European jewelry in an esthetic form with a social-cultural background, and now is developing and fusing identities, reinventing creativity in lucid and playful finds between China-Europe, showing how jewelery is connected both East and West, North and South, and all have a common origin and a differentiated development. Mafi Espirito Santo