Born into an artistic family in 1971, Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos’s 30-year career carries with it the unmistakable timbre of her massive installations, sculptures assembled from embroidered, crocheted, and knitted elements, but also everyday objects like pianos, laptops, commercially produced decorative objects.

This contrast of mass-produced and handcrafted artefacts creates a striking dialectic of our values and associations with each. For within the layers of Vasconcelos’s work, we find a complex challenge to confront these ‘feminine’ crafts with feminist concerns and societal conventions.

Trained as a jewellery maker, Vasconcelos says she still “thinks like one” – but it is the scale of this trade that is now writ large across her corpus of work. Using her background in drawing, her work is “built like a jewellery piece”, where Vasconcelos also knits, crochets and sews, all crafts that are integrated in her oversized works.

A fan of Nouveau Réalisme, inspired by Marcel Duchamp, Donald Judd and Louise Bourgeois, her pop art conceptualism employs objects from daily life, from which she decontextualises – in these larger-than-life statements, magical whimsy and creativity tower above those who gaze upon her works, immersing them into a different world.

Her works start from a drawing that is then developed into more detailed architectural drawings, 3D models and maquettes; but the final product is only realised right until Vasconcelos installs the final of so many pieces laid out on the floor of her studio.

Her ongoing series of colourful ‘Valkyries’, ongoing since 2004, is inspired by the female figures of Norse mythology who flew over battlefields, to pay homage to women often forgotten by male-dominated history – such as Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved African-American woman whose legal battle for freedom in 1781 helped make slavery illegal in Massachusetts.

In 2004, Vasconcelos created the first of her expansive ‘Valkyrie’ installations – small pieces that fit in her luggage which she took to a TV interview in São Paulo. Two decades later, these large, suspended bodies have come to dominate the spaces in which they inhabit.

By discovering forgotten women from all parts of the world, Vasconcelos teaches the history of a place through the women who were from it. Valkyrie Seondeok, in Hong Kong, for example, celebrated Queen Seondeok, a 7^th century female sovereign of the Three Kingdoms of Korea.  With Valkyrie Miss Dior, Vasconcelos honours Catherine Dior, the sister of Christian Dior, a member of French Resistance who was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, surviving and then helping her brother build the Dior brand as his model and muse.

Vasconcelos attracted international attention at the 2005 Venice Biennale with A Noiva (The Bride), a chandelier crafted from 14,000 OB tampons. She was again the talk of the Biennale in 2011, with her installation Contaminação, which opened the group exhibition The World Belongs to You at the Palazzo Grassi.

Such is the expansiveness of these works, even ranging up to 50m in dimensions, that the Valkyrie has to engage with the physicality and architecture of the building, adapting to its interior in a dialogue between the work itself and its host. Vasconcelos says that here the sculpture no longer plays a secondary role to the architecture, but “shares the space” and ambiance.

But then Vasconcelos’s work is imbued with the political too. The artist has placed women’s issues and social concerns at the forefront of her work, with a sincerity that recognises the crucial role artists play in our life:

“If I don’t deal with those things, I’m not being sincere. Of course, I have privileges that 80% of women in the world don’t have. I’m aware that if I don’t fulfil my role as a privileged person, then I’m not doing the right thing.

“I need to be a voice for women who don’t have one. I need to expand as much as I can to make that voice as strong and loud as I can to respect the women who don’t have the same rights, quality of life, or privileges that I have as a European woman living in Portugal.”

Call Centre, photo: Luis Vasconcelos, www.joanavasconcelos.com

Call Centre (2014-2016)

The Beretta model reproduced here was created by assembling 168 black telephones, and recreates the violence inherent in mass communications, through a title that evokes a dehumanised, manipulative call centre. “No matter how noble the reason for its use, a gun is never free of its aggressive charge; likewise, mass communication – large-scale, standardised, monitored and exploitative – can be an exercise in violating the subject’s infinite singularities.” Musician Jonas Runa composed an electro acoustic symphony for telephone ringers, with the suspended headsets and a powerful speaker inside the barrel of the gun creating a dissonant environment.

Marylin, photo: Luis Vasconcelos, www.joanavasconcelos.com