Jardim de Verão

Jardim de Verão (Summer Garden) continues my exploration of collecting from nature: what these objects come to mean to us and why we are drawn to them. Here, I incorporated the broken shell—or “test”—of a sea urchin into a free-flow drawing that evokes a garden.

I thought about where the shell had been found—during a summer on the Brazilian coast—and how it carried me back to that time. The act of collecting became a desire to preserve the memory: to keep a physical token of a moment that had passed.

Later, I learned that a sea urchin’s test is formed from interlocking plates and shaped to withstand the immense pressure of the water surrounding it. Yet the one I found was already broken in half. It became another reminder of life’s cycles: an object that now appears so delicate had once protected a living body.