BIOGRAPHY

Thierry Ferreira is a visual artist, born in Le Plessis Trevise, France. He graduated in Visual Arts at the School of Arts and Design of Caldas da Rainha (Portugal), in 2009. 
He created and directed his own independent sculpture atelier, at the same time he goes on with his research in contemporary visual arts. He lives and works in Alcobaça (Portugal)  and in Le Plessis Trevise (France), as well.

 

CURRICULUM VITAE

 

WORK

Thierry Ferreira has been developing, since 2006, a vast body of work that has the “House” as its main theme. His work explores the relationship between Man and his House, trying to establish connections between the construction of the contemporary Man and its archaic equivalent in that same construction, in architectural-anthropological terms. The artist primarily seeks to show evidence that memories are imprinted in the structure of the house through various techniques, supports and materials.

The House represents, as a symbol, all of life’s construction. The biological body with which we’re born lives experiences that it cannot contain within itself except as memories, always volatile and intangible, impossible to hold, but projectable and replicable. To fixate those memories, objects are kept that derive from those projections and make palpable and recurring the experience of living, but above all of reliving through the senses.

The original body, by a biological imperative, seeks to expand itself beyond its limited organicity, it builds a second body, artificial, bigger, more resistant to bad weather and time, that protects it, shelters it and allows it to shelter other outer symbols of life’s experiences, through which it lives and relives. That second body is the House. But that body too is alive, it breathes, it needs to be nourished, it is mutable and vulnerable to the elements and to time. That body is born, lives and dies.

Just like we live in a unique biological body that identifies us (to the senses, ours and of those that surround us) and is the “Home” of our mind, by also attributing the emotional dimension of “Home” to the House we inhabit, we project in that second body our own identity: it is “our” body, it reflects our Being, just like the first body and any other projections and constructions of our mind.

The body in which we’re born harbors our mind, and the body that we build, that is, the House, keeps safe the first body and the objects that our mind makes us build. Perhaps unconsciously, we search in the House the construction and fixation of our identity: the House is a means, a path to stability, and at the same time its own end (the Home), even if just symbolically.

But, because life is susceptible to the influence of each and every interaction, we are naturally led to search new bodies every time one no longer fits the conditions of the original body and mind. And, when we do not find those shelters to be already built, we are compelled to build ever more, until we find the one whose identity is our own, or the one whose identity we accept for ourselves, the one that may be our home, that may give us our stability, while we leave behind empty bodies that once we inhabited.

“With the house image we are in possession of a veritable principle of psychological integration. (…) On whatever theoretical horizon we examine it, the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being. (…) Now everything becomes clear, the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them” — Gaston Bachelard (1957)