Teresa Firmino’s healing women

Teresa Firmino is an intriguing and highly successful multimedia artist, now well established with Everard Read gallery. Her unusual upbringing in the former military community of Pomfret in the northwest of SA underpins much of the concepts and iconography that make up her art.

Pomfret is inhabited by many Portuguese-speaking soldiers who fought in 32 Battalion on the SA side in the Angolan border war during apartheid. Firmino’s work often deals with the posttraumatic stress affecting her family and community there.

The current body of work — an exhibition titled Olondavi Viotembo — extends the concept of her previous exhibition at Read’s Circa gallery, with a focus on the women of her family. Not only do these matriarchs transcend the circumstances of trauma and abuse visited on their community by the menfolk’s legacy of war and death, they also carry the healing power of both traditional medicine and folk wisdom.

Firmino’s multimedia approach — combining painting, collage, video, and soft, textile-based sculptural pieces — builds a visual narrative around these women, and particularly their traditional healing practices, often at odds with the science-based approach of Western medicine. The theme of the power of herbs and plants to heal is prominent in the show.

The large multimedia painting works dominate the show and extend Firmino’s unique visual language and colour palette. Her baroque figures, at times with strange composites and collage-like juxtapositions in the picture plane, between machines and human beings, for example, are quirky and mysterious. In many of them the healing plants and herbs are pictured or alluded to in titles.

The artist, in her exhibition statement, also attributes to the women in her family the power not only of healing, but of storytelling, their vocation the passing on of wisdom and lore from generation to generation.

Soft sculptures

The artist also extends her practice in this exhibition, combining performance elements drawn from the healing and shamanic thematics of the show into a video piece. This was somewhat obscurely staged in the gallery, with some viewers even unaware that it was showing behind ornately embroidered blackout curtains.

But perhaps the centrepiece of the show is staged in the smaller exhibition room of the Read gallery. Here stand a group of “healers”, textile-based “soft sculptures” which layer wool, thread and numerous fabrics to comprise a group of portentous, even ominous human-like figures, with their shamanic and ritual qualities emphasised by amulets and icons woven and sewn into their “costumes” or about their persons.

Reminiscent of the fantastic and outre shaman costumes made from recycled materials by artists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, these fascinating figures draw together the themes evident in the paintings, presiding over the artist’s narratives in much the same way as her matriarchs preside over the community’s health and the family’s archive. 

Firmino’s own contribution to her family’s matriarchal narrative in her art is in a unique visual language, one she is developing from one exhibition to the next. It is colourful, powerful and affecting. She is indeed an artist to look out for.   

The Olondavi Viotembo exhibition is on Everard Read Johannesburg until September 21.