Belony Alma Ferreira (Santo Antônio da Patrulha, RS, 1935) was 53 years old when she enrolled at the Atelier Livre of the Municipal Government of Porto Alegre to take a course in “Art for the Elderly.” She had no formal training, nor any experience in the field of art. At that moment, as she recalls, she only had the “experience of watching clouds.” A former farmer, born and raised amid sugarcane cultivation, she encountered the visual arts in adulthood, giving her old companion, the soil, a central role in her work.
A political activist, Belony took part, in 1985, in the historic occupation of Fazenda Annoni, in the municipality of Sarandi (RS), a landmark in the founding of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). Six years later, returning to the location, she encountered the mud clinging to the skin and clothes of the farmers who, temporarily settled, were seeking land reform. This sensory and indelible experience changed her life forever.
[...] When I arrived, it had rained. In the middle of the woods, there was a small stream, and some women were washing clothes. I went over to them, and on my way back, they walked ahead of me along a very narrow path. They stepped on that soaked earth, their boots sinking in, some losing their sandals, which got stuck in the mud. It was red clay, very red, pure pigment, that looked like blood. I kept staring at it, deeply struck by that heavy, strong clay that clung to them. And I thought: “This is madness… What makes these people have such determination, such willingness to resist, to fight? It can only be the strength that comes from this earth.”
Without quite knowing her purpose, she collected a sack of clay. Back in Porto Alegre, in her studio, she thought about shaping some form, trying ceramics, but soon gave up. She then began to use it as paint: “I put a little on white paper and… My God!!! It had an incredible vibration!!!” Moved, she began to explore the color, plasticity, and consistency of this unusual raw material, while sharing her experiments and reflections with the teachers who guided her.
Abstract, with broad gestures and forms suggesting tension and overflow, her first paintings with soil, dating from the early 1990s, reveal the impact of her experience in Sarandi. There was, undeniably, the agrarian conflict and the axis of labor and communal life as a social and political backdrop, but something else was emerging with far greater force: a new perception of this material, in its tangibility and symbolism.
During her childhood and youth, Belony walked barefoot; stained her clothes with the rich brown soil; plowed, planted, cared for, harvested, and lived off the land, seen as mere subsistence. Then, suddenly, she began to develop another understanding, never entirely clear, but one that manifested in her artistic production.
In one of her works, conceived as a triptych, she sought to suggest a “great eye” radiating energy and light. She placed soil dissolved in water inside rubber balloons and, once filled, dropped them from above onto canvases laid on the ground, causing them to burst. Working with controlled chance, Belony sought forms that evoked energy spreading in all directions. Only many years later, observing the same triptych in reverse, did she realize that the shape was closer to a vulva and, in that sense, far more powerful, as a vulva brings forth life, brings it to Earth, liberates, and expands.
The relationship between earth as “substance” and Mother Earth emerged, finding in circular supports an evocation of the planet and of the feminine principle. At the same time, in the amalgam of making-feeling-thinking, increasingly aware of the grandeur of her raw material on one hand and of her own smallness as an inhabitant of the Earth on the other, the artist decided to grant greater autonomy to the clay. This meant abandoning brushes and adopting a more contemplative approach, perceiving in the living, pulsating substrate its expressive value—as something that nourishes us, both materially and transcendentally.
In her compact and modest studio, surrounded by jars of mud in various shades of ochre, Belony pours liquefied clay onto canvases, following the drying process and observing the clay contracting or expanding, making its own path. Sometimes subtle, but often dramatic, the cracks resulting from this process evoke the fissured surfaces of arid regions, such as the sertão, and express, in her view, the cry of Gaia amid the climate emergencies caused by human action. Some are so dense that they rupture, detaching from the surface and exposing the canvas with traces of the lost fragment—almost like a palimpsest.
There is a certain misfortune in this, mitigated by the beauty of what remains, in its weight, fragility, and concreteness: slabs that project in various sizes, textures, tears, reliefs, and curvatures, interwoven with veins—thin and thick, fluid and abrupt—in vibrant and striking colors.
At the same time as she explores this hardened pictorial crust, the artist feels the need for fluidity. On larger supports, usually rectangular, she slowly and thoughtfully pours highly diluted clay solutions. In the simplicity of the gesture, translated into stains and washes, she creates paintings of a diaphanous, vaporous quality, marked by many layers, flows, and fusions. Introspective and silent, these canvases hold a special character for Belony, suggesting what belongs to the realm of energy: “For me, it’s like a transmutation of matter, something spiritual.”
Belony Ferreira recognized herself as an artist at the threshold of what used to be called “old age.” When many might think of slowing down or stopping, she accelerated. If her beginnings—attending experimental classes at the Atelier Livre of Porto Alegre—suggest curiosity and openness to the unknown, her trajectory, pursued with discipline and dedication, attests to resilience and courage. Open to challenges, she sought out geologists and engineers to identify the plastic richness of different soils. With the help of her mentors, she learned to clean, grind, sift, and make paint, submerging clumps in water for days to achieve the right malleability. Fully conscious throughout the process, observing and feeling what she did, she absorbed the rhythms and tempos of the earth. Tireless, Belony also performed alongside artists, covering their bodies with mud in an attempt to impart the same telluric energy she had witnessed in Sarandi. She worked on papers over 20 meters long, producing drawings of impressive vigor and power. Nor did she hesitate in the face of dozens of invitations from schools and NGOs to lead workshops for children and young people in the outskirts of the southern capital. Unafraid of judgment, connected and serene, she embraced a full life.
In this journey, it was the earth that showed her the way, the earth that revealed her essence, the earth that sustained her—the same earth that, as a farmer, she had plowed, sown, and harvested. Her work, grounded in a unique history and lived experience, in the intertwining of body and matter, is a true event—activating blocks of sensation that shake the ordinary, surprise, and enchant.
Paula Ramos
Curator
