Maria Madeira
Expo­sure

Paint­ing with Sunshine

The mar­riage between the old or tra­di­tion­al with the new and con­tem­po­rary will 
bring won­ders. Dr Maria Madeira

At the age of nine, artist Maria Madeira and her fam­i­ly were forcibly evac­u­at­ed from Dili to a refugee camp run by the Red Cross on the out­skirts of Lis­bon, Por­tu­gal. Here, she met skilled tais-weaver Dona Veron­i­ca Pereira Maia who inspired her sub­se­quent artis­tic prac­tice and ongo­ing use of tais – tra­di­tion­al Tim­o­rese tex­tile – as a medi­um. At the same time, Madeira’s moth­er pro­duced an intri­cate­ly pat­terned cro­chet that she gift­ed to her daugh­ter as a memen­to of their fraught his­to­ry and mul­ti­ple dis­place­ments dur­ing the Indone­sian invasion. 

For the exhi­bi­tion Expo­sure, Madeira over­lays her mother’s cro­chet onto tais from her home dis­trict of Ermera, leav­ing the fab­ric under the blis­ter­ing sun of West­ern Aus­tralia for up to a year. Once the cro­chet is removed, a bleached imprint and fil­i­gree residue is revealed. Abo Feto no Ama Sira (Grand­moth­ers and Moth­ers) pays homage to Madeira’s fore­moth­ers, female­ness and the sig­nif­i­cance of women in the Tim­o­rese cre­ation sto­ry. Accord­ing to locals, all fam­i­ly clans are descen­dants of two sis­ters who mar­ried a croc­o­dile dur­ing pri­mor­dial times. Madeira alludes to the resilience of Tim­o­rese women by hon­our­ing her mother’s labour and fin­ger­prints, tra­di­tion­al folk­lore and the sun’s pow­er­ful rays as moth­er earth. 

Fol­low­ing on from Madeira’s exhi­bi­tion Kiss and Don’t Tell for the inau­gur­al Tim­or-Leste pavil­ion at the 60^th Venice Bien­nale 2024, Madeira con­tin­ues to deploy mate­ri­als from her envi­ron­ment that are unique to Tim­or. Giv­en there are no art sup­ply stores in Dili, Madeira resource­ful­ly utilis­es betel­nut often used for cer­e­mo­ni­al occa­sions to stain her art­works, beta­dine to ref­er­ence wounds and tais to sym­bol­ise the women of Tim­or-Leste. Tais is an inte­gral part of Tim­o­rese cul­tur­al her­itage, woven by women with a back-strap loom and sym­bol­ic local­ly grown cot­ton. Tais from Ermera, Madeira’s birth­place, is com­posed of inky blacks and vivid indi­go as the dye­ing tech­nique utilis­es mud. She also sews geo­met­ric sym­bols such as con­cen­tric cir­cles and cross­es onto the tex­tile that are baked by the sun. The resul­tant imprints fuse light and lin­eage, hope and history. 

Madeira expos­es the tex­tile as a way to high­light the plight of Tim­o­rese women and their desire to be visible: 

‘I want to show that the dark­ness has been lift­ed and now the light the sun­light will show us who we are. We can clear­ly see, thus cement­ing our cul­tur­al identity.’ 

Madeira’s sun series lit­er­al­ly shines light on ‘…the impact of envi­ron­men­tal beau­ty and pow­er that shapes our moth­er­land and moth­er earth. It is used addi­tion­al­ly in ref­er­ence to the term ​“Loro Sa’e”, sun­rise.’ In an art­work titled Coro Loro Sa’e (Sun­rise Choir), Madeira ref­er­ences the tra­di­tion­al Tim­o­rese choir of the same name that she joined as an ado­les­cent in the refugee camp. Trav­el­ling and per­form­ing around Por­tu­gal, Eng­land and Wales, singing pro­vid­ed sal­va­tion to Madeira and a way to main­tain her cul­ture heritage. 

By adept­ly acknowl­edg­ing the labour of women and the sacred­ness of tra­di­tion­al tex­tiles, Madeira binds ances­tral influ­ences and tra­di­tion­al crafts with con­tem­po­rary con­cerns. In so doing, she expos­es the radi­ance of paint­ing with sunshine. 

Pro­fes­sor Natal­ie King OAM
All quotes are from emails between the artist and author, 2024