The artist and designer Bya Medeiros is originally from Brazil and now lives and works in Dublin. Bya began her career as an educator, environmentalist and designer. She graduated in Philosophy and specialized in art education from the State University of Minas Gerais/UEMG in 1999, in Belo Horizonte/BR. In 2017 she obtained a master degree in Arts, Urbanities and Sustainability from the Federal University of São João Del Rei/MG - Brazil.
She has worked as a ceramic designer in her studio in Brazil since 1997. Her research and ceramic experiments explore earth, water and fire, as processes of coexistence between these natural elements. Her ceramic sculptures have been exhibited in commercial galleries in cities such as Belo Horizonte, Recife and Rio de Janeiro/Brazil.
Alongside her work as a designer and educator, Bya has worked as an activist on socio-environmental issues as a vehicle for education, subversion and protest. Between 2004-2008, her practices of intervention (activism) in urban-public areas were aimed at reporting and reflecting on socio-environmental issues in the city. She used the urban landscape as a strategy in the use of the aesthetics of resistance, seeking to reinterpret the subjective city.
From 2006 onwards, in addition to urban activism, she began her quest to establish poetics in the natural landscape, in transit on site, and attentive to the dialogues and relationships between man and nature. For Bya, the action of intervening in natural spaces is like evoking the sacred, a gesture of rite in a sacred place: nature. Her coming and going on these sites inaugurated a new relationship between the appropriation of knowledge and the construction of her poetic narratives.
When she started her master degree in 2016, her research took on a new dimension, focusing on the theme of urban and natural landscapes, seeking to examine and understand the relationship between society, culture and nature through her journeys in the city and the countryside. As she finished her master degree, Bya Medeiros exhibited four art installations, two videos and documentary photographs of the sites she visited. Between 2017 and 2019, some of her works were selected and exhibited in art galleries in Brazil.
In search of new challenges, she crossed the seas to study the English language and Irish culture. With her previous aesthetic experiences, Bya also began to absorb the new culture and its beautiful landscapes, and to move between beautiful urban parks and countryside trails. Thinking about how to translate the poetics of Ireland natural and cultural landscape, she began to collect flowers, leaves, twigs and seeds that had fallen to the ground and belonged to the place where she was passing by. In search of affective dialogues between the natural landscape and its fragments, Bya Medeiros transports a small extract of this dialogue into her frames.
She invites us all to think and breathe through this aesthetic: nature.