Vera Sampaio Brazil

I am delighted to present for sale eight embroidered works by Vera Sampaio, a fabric artist based in Fortaleza, Brazil.

These works, under the title Personal Botanical (Botânico Particular), are in fact multi-layered; a collaboration between two artists both based in the city of Fortaleza, North-eastern Brazil. Wilson Neto provides the drawn design, and Vera interprets it in thread.

Wilson Neto has exhibited widely within Brazil and internationally, most recently at the Museum of the City of Skopje, Macedonia. His work brings together aspects of daily, urban experience with a fascination for the ancient. Ancient artefacts, symbols and mythologies fuse his work, whilst remaining connected to the contemporary.

Vera’s work is exhibited and collected widely and can be found in many private collections

around the globe. Her technical prowess and love for the medium of embroidery, together with an instinctive playfulness, makes her work a joy to observe and collect.

Brazil’s unique, complex and fertile mix of indigenous, African and European cultures are reflected in these works, which depict or evoke both imagined and observed botanical elements and worlds, but often also mermaids, female warriors and other folkloric elements that are so present in Brazilian culture.

The use of thread as an artistic, narrative and symbolic medium has a very natural relevance to this work, as Vera works within the tradition of weaving meaning and story with thread - from the pre-colombian khipu tradition, where strings and threads were used to record data and stories by Inca peoples (and many other peoples of the Central Andean region) to the most rarefied and commodified tapestries of late medieval Europe. Today, embroidery,

tapestry and thread works have found new, contemporary forms in the work of Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold and Anni Albers, among so many others.

The 'Personal Botanical' series has been shown most recently at Galeria Teo (São Paulo, Brazil) in 2024, with other gallery exhibitions planned. As Vera Sampaio continues to work in her eighth decade, each work becomes slower and more pensive to produce as the rythmn of her hand and eye changes, embuing another layer of preciousness and uniqueness to each work. 

Vera Sampaio's longstanding collaboration with Wilson Neto, is one which blends and merges the notions of fine art and craft, and which has friendship and mutual creative freedom at its heart.