Around the Clay – Portugal

In 2024, I spent a month in residence with Isabel Tavares Sanches, a Cape Verdean ceramicist from the ceramic community of Trás di Munti on Santiago. Shortly before we met, Isabel had migrated from Cape Verde to Lisbon. Under her guidance, I worked with clay for the first time and learned about her community’s ceramic tradition, in which women hold and transmit the knowledge and skills.

During the residency, together with artist Virgínia Fróis, curator and cultural adviser Ricardo Barbosa Vicente, Isabel and her daughter Helena Landim, we organised workshops at Fablab in Lisbon. In these workshops, Isabel connected her ceramic tradition with identities in the city. She has since continued these workshops at Fablab Lisboa and elsewhere in Portugal.

I have followed Isabel’s ceramic practice through textiles since our first meeting. All ceramic processes during the residency and subsequent workshops take place on large sheets of textile. As she shapes Portuguese clay according to her tradition and shares her knowledge, traces of clay and gestures accumulate on the fabric. Together, these textiles form a growing archive of how Isabel continues her ceramic heritage within the diaspora in Portugal.