News from Amsterdam,

Hi Gemma,
Since the start of the “Walking the Gray Area” blog a lot of text, information, coments and pictures have been published and exchanged. Unfortunately I haven’t been very active in keeping up with all that information which I know it is a pity! At the moment I am very busy with many projects and it is dificult for me to react and digest information from so many artists.
What I would like to do and I hope we can manage is to keep (with you) a personal dialogue so that we get to know one another.
I must confess that I know very little about your work and even less about yourself but I am curious about you as creator and as a person.
Today I have googled your name on the internet and it was very nice to see images of your work. I like your pieces very much, they are very beautifull and I love the way you use materials that are not very much related to tradicional jewellery. I also heard that you are staying at the moment at Cambrook University (USA.) and I am curious to know what you are making at the moment. Please let me know??
I also want to use this oportunity to tell you something about myself and my work.
I lived in Brasil until 1987. From 1988 until 1991 I lived in Boston and there I took several classes (in Painting, Printmaking and art theory) at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. Living in Boston meant a lot to me and I was very happy there. For the first time I was living very far away from my family and that gave me a great feeling of freendom and power.
In 1991 I went back to Brasil for 6 months and then I spent a year traveling through Europe and hoping to find a place where I could live and start a new life.
After visiting many cities I went to Amsterdan for a weekend and there I have met and fallen in love with Dennis and for that very important reason I have been living here since 1992.
In Amsterdan I wanted to go back to School and I decided to enroll myself at the Rietveld Academy and somehow I got atracted to the the jewellery department where I graduated in 2000.
I have never really made jewellery in the tradicional sense of the word and I am not interested in making things that you can easily wear. What I am interested is in making objects/installations which have a close relation with the body and I am always trying to find different ways and materials to represent the body.
At he moment I am making a big installation ‘Unveil’ which will be presented in New York from 13 October at the Museum of Arts and Design-MAD part of the exhibition “Slash: Paper under the Knife”.
The work consists of a wall (300 cm x 300cm) with garlands, ribbons and crowns covered with small flowers made from ‘medicine leaflets information to use’.
In front of this field of flowers hangs a curtain (also 300 cm x 300 cm) of chains also made from the ‘medicine leaflets’.
Since 2 years ago I have been collecting those ‘medicine leaflets” from friends, friends of friends, family menbers, lovers and acquaintances. I am very fond and proud of this work which tells so much about the fragility of the human body.
I send you now an image of the work so that you can have an idea of it.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely, Célio Braga