Paula Brito (Lisbon, 1968), aka Paula Badala
As in any good story, the main character has a peculiar name. Badala began as a nickname, when she was a young primary school student, whose true meaning is “bohemian and shameless woman”, but now assumes a posture of creative freedom.”
Spent several years working as a journalist at a series of prestigious newspapers – Diário Económico and Jornal de Negócios, as editor of the Media and Advertising sections; editor of Media and Television, Arts and Op-Ed at Diário de Notícias; opinion columnist at Notícias TV and later a writer for Dinheiro Vivo, the Diário de Notícias’ digital Economics site – before deciding to work in a different field of communication, the arts, through the launch of the Badala project. Around the same time, she enrolled at ArCo school, where she is currently attending the third year of a course in Drawing and Painting. During the Covid-19 lockdown she did the Modern Art & New Ideas online course provided by MoMA, in New York.
Through research into the ancestral art of knitting, the Badala project began with several sculptural pieces of the male and female bodies – the material that usually clothes the skin, such as wool, becomes the skin, in what can be called a provocation. But the roots of this work are in strong stroked drawings and paintings, as if through extensions of her arms, with vibrant colours adapted to large scale retro and vintage design shapes and objects, or reinterpretations of jewellery to textiles, according to the soft jewellery concept.
So, as Louise Bourgeois said, “I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands…”. The hands which today hold the brush that paints lines on giant canvases, or that take the needle to make a sculpture, are the same hands that for years wrote about other people’s stories. But the head of that once silly girl has changed indeed, and it now knows no bounds!