Wave-Particle HyperLightness, by Margarida Sardinha
The work of Margarida Sardinha is constantly evolving. The medium can range from digital projection to animation, light-box and installation. Margarida’s latest works involve holographic techniques. As an artist, the driving force behind all these devices is an uncompromising quest for understanding and making sense of existence; space, time and matter. The various methods employed are but tools along the way, to be utilised where they can be to visualise the journey, making real and capturing moments that might usefully be termed absorption, contemplation and ecstasy.
Margarida’s journey is one of constant exploration, an archaeological quest of discovery, mapping out interior journeys for us, visualising aspects of the landscape that plays such a vital part in our existence.
This exhibition sees a new medium enter this mix, holography. The ‘image’ in this case oscillates before us, floating like a rogue planet. As in previous works, the concern is to demonstrate the illusion of kinetic movement, where the viewer places herself in the midst of the scene, a spectacle that arrests, seduces and hypnotises the participant. These are hard won images, arrived at through extensive research, spanning cultures and millennia, including studies in symbolism, physics, comparative religion and mythology. Ultimately however, they rely largely on grasping instinct, perception and feeling – feeling one’s way through forces that may well be beyond our mental reach.
Philosophy seems to find its conclusion in religion and Margarida finds solace and inspiration between these inter-connected worlds.
Article by Neil McConnon (UK), Head of International Enterprises at Barbican Centre, London.
(The exhibition is being hosted at Espaço Camões of Livraria Sá da Costa, until 29 June, and was organized by Ocupart.)