Solange Pessoa is renowned for evocative and poetic works that contemplate nature, the human body, and the forces that shape our existence. Her practice often delves into the realms of the organic and the metaphysical, with a focus on the materiality of life. The Brazilian artist’s work is influenced by her surroundings, particularly the natural environment of her home region of Minas Gerais, where mining is a prevalent force.

As such, Pessoa’s output is rooted in the telluric relationship between the landscape and the body, revealing hidden aspects of the earth. Through her dreamlike installations, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, and paintings, she entwines the geological with human consciousness to reveal the connection between material and memory.

Since the 1980s, Pessoa has explored the transmutation of organic matter and bodily fluids such as blood and human hair to recount the cycles of life and death. According to Pessoa, “materials exist in connection with thoughts and intuitions. They call us and choose us, they attract our perception and curiosity, and their untransferable nature and mysteries require research and close observation.”

To mark “Catch the sun with your hand,” her new Aspen Art Museum exhibition on view through Oct. 26, I spoke to the indelible artist about the parallels between Aspen and Minas Gerais, her stone collection, and the sense of incompleteness at the core of her work.

CULTURED: In 1879, rich silver veins were discovered in the Roaring Fork Valley, setting off a mining boom. At its peak, Aspen produced one-sixth of the nation’s silver. You often speak of growing up in Minas Gerais, which translates to “General Mines.” How has that landscape shaped you?

Solange Pessoa: The landscape of Minas Gerais has shaped me in ways both mythic and dramatic, somber and troubling. Countless immense, irreversible holes have been dug there, and in recent years, serious environmental disasters have pushed this tragic dimension to the fore. For centuries, the earth has been removed and shipped to distant parts of the globe, and the emptiness left behind provokes disquieting reflections. The great poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade—who was born in Itabira, a city whose mountain was eaten away by mining—once said that the landscape becomes nothing more than a photograph on the wall.

CULTURED: On the roof of the Aspen Art Museum, we are showing seven carved soapstone (pedra sabão) sculptures. How do you treat inside versus outside?

Pessoa: In Aspen, crystals and silver inside the museum converse with soapstone sculptures outside, engaging the snow-covered mountains in an almost dreamlike register—opacity with brilliance, textures with colors, forms with transtemporal conditions.

CULTURED: Many of your pieces evolve over years and in stages. Could you speak to the process-based nature of your work?

Pessoa: Installations grow slowly, and I often feel a sense of “incompleteness,” a constant expansion. Certain works remain “open,” always in motion. I still think about pieces from the 1990s—about enlarging their scale, adding or subtracting elements. They behave like germinative nuclei, or cells that replicate, aggregate, and expand their biological nature.

CULTURED: When I visited your studio in Belo Horizonte, I was struck by the stones you collect. When did that begin?

Pessoa: As a child, I collected small stones, some of which I still have. I never stopped collecting them, or observing, feeling, and trying to listen to their silences. It is my “subjective geology.” In my new studio, I hope to organize the collection more thoughtfully. I regard it as a work in progress.

CULTURED: Bags, 1994–2025, recomposed here in Aspen, functions as an archive containing material and symbolic extracts from various temporal layers. How are those disparate memories, substances, and emotions held together?

Pessoa: Because Bags is a vast archive that houses multiple temporal and symbolic dimensions, its conceptual nature contains memories in fragments. Stored and processed by the collective unconscious, it is, metaphorically, a grand psychic apparatus of the natural world.

CULTURED: On the museum’s lower level, we have installed Deliria Deveras, 2021–24: 22 metric tons of crystal studded with silver. The piece emanates light, in contrast to Bags. How do you see the two works in relation to each other?

Pessoa: Both installations are telluric and carry the memory of the natural world. Bags is all about the ground and soil—earth, mineral, animal, vegetal, and human realms. Deliria Deveras brings to the surface a luminosity that was subterranean and hidden. The crystals and silver—the entire material and radiant intensity—were once underground. It is delirium!

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