Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva

Her subject matter may be serious – nationality, identity, migration and displacement – but the exuberance and joy in her sculptures and textile works shine through

Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva, installation view, Mostyn, Llandudno, 2025. Photo: Rob Battersby.

Mostyn, Llandudno
15 February – 31 May 2025

by BETH WILLIAMSON

The São Paulo-born artist Vanessa da Silva has just opened a joyous new exhibition at Mostyn in Llandudno, Wales. Taking inspiration from her Brazilian heritage, Da Silva looks to her family history, music and dance, as well as the legacy of Brazilian artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. The pervading tone of Roda Viva, or wheel of life, is one of a joyous celebration of life. In her colourful, twisting sculptures and hanging textile works, Da Silva gestures to the constant movement, to lives in motion. The floor-based sculptures seem to writhe with energy, barely contained as static objects, while hanging translucent textiles sway gently as the air around them moves along with the passage of visitors through the gallery space.

Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva, installation view, Mostyn, Llandudno, 2025. Photo: Rob Battersby.

The exhibition’s title, Roda Viva, references the cycles of life, generational histories and the often-surprising associations between time past, present and future. It also gestures to the “roda de samba” (circle of life or circle of dance), referring to communal dance that takes place in Brazil to commemorate occasions such as Amerindian or Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies, and also engaged with spontaneously. This makes sense when you visit the exhibition and experience a strong pull to dance among the floor-based sculptures, a joyous atmosphere that invites such movement. Ideas of joy, celebration and freedom may be at the centre of this colourful exhibition, with careful visual and spatial placement of works precipitating movement and rhythm, but it is not without serious intent. She explores ideas of nationality, identity, migration and displacement, reflected in her own experience as a Latin American immigrant to the UK, living in London since the early 2000s.

Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva, installation view, Mostyn, Llandudno, 2025. Photo: Rob Battersby.

Individual works and the exhibition as a whole encapsulate many opposites. Solid and contained works give way to softer sprawling elements. Smooth shiny colourful surfaces sit next to sandy textured surfaces. Two and three dimensions vie for attention in a single work. Separate spaces are pulled together by a small line of beans around the entire gallery edge. Contained within sheer net of different colours, this easily overlooked line performs an important job, providing a unity of purpose to a group of disparate works. Spaces may be inside solid walls or more ethereal in their condition. Sculptures stretch horizontally through the length of the gallery while hanging textile works exist in the vertical spaces above, seeming to float within architectural spaces, setting sheer and solid, hard and soft in an interplay that generates further interest in looking.

Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva, installation view, Mostyn, Llandudno, 2025. Photo: Rob Battersby.

The floor-based sculptures are on a human scale, but are anything other than human. Their otherness and sense of flow or movement suggests a slow metamorphosis, a state of flux that unsettles and disconcerts while still allowing us to identify with these “beings”. This is Da Silva’s investigation of the spaces and overlaps between nationalities, borders, identities and cultures. The forms may be alien to us, but they retain an element we can identify with as fellow beings. The sense of movement inherent in these sculptures comes partly from the fact that Da Silva often works concurrently on multiple sculptures, negotiating their forms with her body as she moves between them, entwined with, but separate from, their dynamism. Capturing this sense of fluidity in static elements of these hybrid forms is a mystery to be solved. Their choreography is similar in its pace and pulse to her larger Muamba Grove works shown at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2022. Now indoors in a gallery space, their energy is perhaps even greater.

Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva, installation view, Mostyn, Llandudno, 2025. Photo: Rob Battersby.

The soft elements of the sculptures consist of coloured translucent net. This is sewn into long narrow lengths and filled to bursting with black and white beans or rice. These are staple foods and therefore common ingredients in traditional Brazilian cooking. All of these are stitched by the artists, as are the hanging pieces. The figurative images sewn on to the net fabric in a collaged manner arise from historical family photographs that Da Silva has used as a blueprint of sorts to create a circular work that visitors can stand within, surrounded by family, and perhaps recognise the similarities between us all rather than any differences. Within this space, there is a sense of calm, of safety, somewhat removed from the vibrant movement of the sculptures and a sanctuary of sorts.

Da Silva’s early training – she was awarded a BFA in product design from FAAP, São Paulo in 1999 – shines through in the finish of much of her work. An MA in painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017 extended her skills, while awards and residencies have allowed her to expand her artistic practice.

Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva, installation view, Mostyn, Llandudno, 2025. Photo: Rob Battersby.

With work in several group shows since 2016 and one or two solo shows a year since 2017, Da Silva’s reputation is gathering pace. This exhibition at Mostyn feels as if it arises at an important juncture for the artist’s career. With a variety of work from painting to sculpture to textiles and installation, she addresses the personal and political in a manner that does not preach about its seriousness but instead shares joy that captivates an audience and holds them still with the work for long enough to realise that the joyful and the serious coexist. In the heart of their exuberance, the newly commissioned works in Roda Vida do that perfectly. Seriousness is there in the midst of joy and all the more effective for it.