Isabel Carvalho

Isabel Carvalho lives and works in Porto. Her work encompasses the intimate relationships between the visual arts, writing and publishing. By recurrently attending to the materiality of language and its extensions through non-verbal forms of expression, she seeks to sensitize and preserve diversified and, consequently, inclusive socialization ecosystems, populated by humans and non-humans.

Carvalho is a graduate of the School of Fine Arts of Porto (and holds a master’s degree in Image Design from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP). Among his recent exhibitions, the following stand out: Langages Tissés, Centre d’Arte Le Lait, France, AR(a)C(hné)-EN-CIEL, GaleriaQuadrado Azul (Lisbon), Strange Attractor, Pavilhão Branco (Lisbon) and Pies de barro (curated by Chus Martinez and Filipa Ramos), at the Municipal Gallery of Porto.

The group of organic sculptures and incense made by Isabel Carvalho is part of a recent series that materializes in plaster from a physiological impulse in which the human body registers the trace of its gestures. These objects contain traces of burnt incense and other substances (such as cherry, chestnut and pine sawdust, incense flecks, dried roses, essences, ground charcoal, gum Arabic and pigments), which become incandescent by evoking the intense magnetism of fire.