Margarida de Araujo (1967) is a portuguese painter and sculptor. She studied Plastic Arts and Multimedia in the Instituto Politécnico de Beja and has done different professional courses on ceramics. With her work she has participated in exhibitions in Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and the United States and was granted the price for the best plastic artist by the magazine Revista Mais Alentejo in 2005, 2006 and 2007. She also got a honorable mention in the V Bienal of Plastic Arts in Vidigueira in 2006, and in the Galeria Aberta of Beja in 2002.
The idea of this project arises from the concern with the excess of plastic, treated like trash in the middle of the nature: in the middle of the field, in the beaches and in the sea. Margarida wanted to use plastic as a resource, a raw material to create works of art and at the same time bring up the importance of recycling plastic and creating alternatives to using plastic.
One of the most important roles for an artist is to express their concerns to create debates about what they want to discuss, what they think is urgent to discuss, in this project what I want to express is the importance to start using plastic with a resource, not how something we can throw at nature as garbage and expect it to decompose after 30 or 40 years. With all the problems that excess plastic thrown in the midst of nature is creating: plastic islands in the middle of the oceans, with sizes sometimes larger than some countries, the existence of plastic in many microorganisms, and even in many fish that come into our food, and on some beaches the layers of plastic create slices between layers of sand … etc. If one begins to look at plastics as a resource, as a raw material of sufficient importance to be used even to create works of art, then we become more careful about our use of everyday plastic.
As usually my artwork goes through sculpture and painting, where I use various materials such as ceramics, sculpting and modeling, when I use plastic, I have been creating shapes and shapes, I have been experimenting with the reactions of this material, at temperatures , the processes of fusion and finally their adaptation to other materials and synthetic inks.
The parts created work in part as a whole, the experimentation of materials and the idea of creating an alert for the urgency of recycling and creating alternatives to the use of plastic, and then more individually, in which human figures represent the recycled plastic as a way of evolution and future for mankind, and ceramic murals as the interaction of materials for sustainable and innovative use.
In order to have new ideas for my daily work, this project was important, especially since I introduced materials different from the ones I use regularly, and on the subject of ecology, I hope in a future project to try other recyclable materials for my artistic creation.
For more information about her new projects you can visit Margarida´s website and Facebook