AQUA+32
R. Cónego Joaquim Gaiolas
4750-306 Barcelos
![AQUA+32 @ Museu de Olaria](https://www.museuolaria.pt/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Banner-Museu-300x106.jpg)
Biographical note about the author
Born in 1963, he soon began his interaction with ceramics. It was during his youth that his will to create emerged, manifesting itself through painting, drawing, and sculpting. In 1988 he started his education at CENCAL, in Caldas da Rainha, a city recognized as one of the main Portuguese ceramic centres and today recognized as a UNESCO Creative City in the panorama of Crafts and Folk Arts.
It was only in 1989 that he established his own space and in 1990 he obtained his first recognition with the award “Improvement of Traditional Forms” in the Ceramic Design competition, in Caldas da Rainha. This was only the first of many. He dedicated a large part of the nineties and the new millennium to teaching, research, and experimentation in various fields of ceramic production in high temperatures and was inspired by ancient oriental and western techniques of ceramic production that he combines with his passion for sculpture in his artistic ceramic creations.
Today, with 32 years of a career entirely dedicated to ceramics, which includes dozens of solo and group exhibitions, national and international, he was recently awarded at the International Biennial of Aveiro 2021, and currently, he became a member of the International Academy of Ceramics.
AQUA+32
A moment for reflection, for feeling the meaning of water in my work and my life, since I first felt it touch my body.
Water flows in the Ria de Aveiro lagoon, the veins that traverse the body of the ceramist, the matter the ceramist transforms by hand, applying force like the currents that take the tides through the channels.
The object born from clay soaked in water tells a story, glancing through time that it brings and takes away moments in the lives of the people of the water. The shapes where that water continues its journey are sometimes organic, others geometric. But they all take us back to a moment where the ceramist seeks balance in its creation, like the break between the tides, where the light on the water reflects what surrounds it.
Between them lies dialogues, creator-matter, object-observer, but all these moments occur merely because of the union of the water to matter.
H2O (l) + MATTER(s) creating the object
In this constant quest, my journey proceeded in two directions:
Dialogues, travelling through AQUA, take us through the lagoon channels, like a woman whose lap carries the children who will one day travel the waterways, some familiar, others unknown. By the children’s hand we are driven to question the stories that travel the waterways, their present and their past.
Through +32, arises a journey through my work, through the stoneware and the porcelain transformed by the hot fires, some glazed, some not, revealing the clay’s natural texture. Where the shape of the object is felt through touch and glanced through its relation object – user, which takes us to its archetype – the bowl.[:]