2002/3 Research Group at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London
2001/2 MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design, London
1986/7 Computer Graphics, School of Visual Arts – New York
1976/9 Social Communication, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo

Renata Padovan is a Brazilian artist living and working in São Paulo. She has participated in several residency programmes and exhibitions internationally. Residencies: JSKD, Ljubljana; The Arctic Circle, Norway; THAV, Taipei; NES, Iceland; Nagasawa Art Park, Japan; Braziers international workshop, UK and the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. Among the solo shows in São Paulo: Baró Galeria, Galeria Thomas Cohn, Centro Cultural São Paulo, Galeria Millan. In Rio de Janeiro: Museu do Açude, Paço Imperial and Espaço Cultural dos Correios. Among the group shows: Sesc Pinheiros, São Paulo; THAV Taipei; Cultural Center Parobrod,, Ljubljana; Baró Galeria, São Paulo; Casa Triângulo, São Paulo; Gallery 32, London; MAC São Paulo.

Through my practice I establish a relationship between nature and culture. I work in a number of different media including drawing, photography, sculpture, sound, video and installation, choosing each one to meet the specificity of the project. Two clear concepts can be considered as the central threads in my research, and those are the frontiers as limits and lines in drawings, and the exercise of mapping.

From that perspective, I observe relational processes between landscape and the body, I look for patterns created by natural phenomena, land occupation, borders, the courses of rivers, contours of mountains, motorway networks, etc. I am constantly searching for signs, outlines, elements that interfere in a visual field, elements that I register and afterwards displace and transform in order to re-signify spatial poetics and politics from multisensory experiences.

Ultimately, such works propose points of view, diverse perspectives and altered scales in an attempt to reveal what might not otherwise be possible to apprehend. Landscape is the focal point of my attention. Since landscape is a cultural construct, whether natural or urban space, its ‘becoming’ is directly linked to the time–space coordinate relative to the spectator’s position and perceived according to his cultural background.

Surveying about the Gyeonggi Bay area I would like to propose a project that is directly related to the unique seawater flow characteristic of this region.
My project is to create a visual ‘map’ of the changes in the landscape during the tidal movements; to apprehend, mediated by the surface of the water, changes in the environment due to atmospheric conditions: light, wind, clouds formation, tidal movement, and the influence these atmospheric variations exert on the surroundings. For that I would like to install 5 (GoPro) waterproof time-lapse cameras in different points of the bay, and leave them on for 24 hours. Each camera is tied to a buoy anchored at the bottom of the sea, with enough cable to have it floating at high tide. The cameras are set in time-lapse format with a 30 second interval between the shots, and prearranged to display date and time, so that we can have registered in each take the exact moment it was captured.
The resulting images will be material for three works:
1. one 5 channel video installation
2. 5 prints on cotton paper 150 x 165 cm.
3. a set of 5 books displaying the sequence of images taken in each location, printed in chronological order.

Besides this project, during the residency, I would also conduct research on the flat lands in order to gather images and sounds that will be part of a body of work that I have been developing for the past 15 years in different places around the world. Moreover, it would be interesting to make a work through which I would create a site-specific action taking into account both cultural and physical local specificities. This action would interfere directly on the landscape, in order to propose a reflection on questions related to nature and land occupation; it will be documented by photo and video. In former residencies I had a great experience with those ‘site-specific’ actions such as in Finse, Norway, in Skagaströnd, Iceland and during a residency at the Arctic Circle (attached work samples).