About the work

Luisa Matsushita has created This blanket is a garden, 2024 especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany the exhibition Lygia Clark: The I and the You, 2 Oct 2024 – 12 Jan 2025.

Matsushita’s edition is a canvas weighted blanket, made by the artist in her Sao Paulo studio. Chromatically composed in the organic shapes reminiscent of her paintings, it is divided into four sections, each containing a pouch in which the artist invites you to store a mix of heirloom seeds. This blanket can be placed over a person or displayed folded or hung on a wall when not in use. Accompanying this work is a manifesto and list of instructions, in which the artist proposes a seed mixture selected based on principles of permaculture and agroforestry.

Matsushita is interested in the therapeutic aspects of Lygia Clark’s therapeutic work, moved by how forward-thinking the artist was in questioning gender, community, and democratic dignity. With the idea of guiding people into a state of meditation, and perhaps enabling a reset, Matsushita proposes her weighted blanket as an aid for grounding.

Manifesto

Lay under this blanket.

This is a reverse face mask.

It will cover your body and free your mouth and nose.

This blanket is a seed bag.

Put seeds in each pouch.

Lay under this blanket:

Pretend you are below the ground.

Pretend the seeds are sprouting and you are the soil.

Pretend that your gifts are becoming nutrition;

pretend that your worst patterns and difficult aspects

will be transformed by this plant,

as this plant doesn’t mind you or your problems.

This blanket is a garden.

This blanket is not how you will keep your seeds from now on,

It is a gateway for you to lay down with them,

for you to fall in love with them.

Seeds are dormant.

Once they are activated with water,

for them to become a plant,

they have to explode.

Become unrecognizable,

to become their full expression, fantastic transformation!

So much information in such a small seed.

You can activate seeds by putting them in your mouth.

Pretend you are talking to them

they will hear your needs

Plant them.

Heirloom seeds are among the richest things on earth.

This will soon be on all the newspapers, headlines, hashtags.

The more they go through cycles, the more they adapt.

They keep memories from other places they grew, so they are resourceful.

They will surprise you with their shapes and colors.

They are unique,

but they need to be planted.

Talk about the seeds in your conversations.

(They love to be talked about.)

And I hope

that you dream of those seeds.

Once you dream of them,

come talk to me.

Tell me about those dreams.

 

About the artist

Through vivid pictorial compositions, Luísa Matsushita's painting follows a path towards the minimal and elemental. With precise color work, she explores the relationships present at the boundaries between tonal layers, capable of imparting individuality to each of her works. In her practice, painting becomes realized as it presents itself to the world as an autonomous entity, almost personified, and imbued with a sense of humor.

Consistently focused on fragments of everyday reality, her gaze seeks to stretch the visibility of trivial elements. For Matsushita, painting reveals itself as an act of urgency and courage, resulting from the impulse to create something intimate, everyday, and protected. Thus, through gestural movements, her archipelago of compositions can also refer to the portrayal of a dwelling, imagining ways to imaginatively inhabit the property of each color.

After more than a decade of touring worldwide, she dedicated herself, starting in 2014, to the study and practice of bioconstruction, permaculture, and Earthship Biotecture, deepening her knowledge of agroecology through a series of experiences in the United States and Latin America. Her learning from nature allowed Matsushita to develop her own ecological home - a sustainable shack - in 2018. Turning it into a life project, the artist connected all her research in one place, spatializing her painting on walls, gates, and interior furniture.

Selected exhibitions

Among her recent solo exhibitions are: If it's not for crying, I don't even leave the house, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil (2023); ELA, Galerie L'Amazonie, Manaus, AM (2015); and Animal, Percy Gallery, Oakland, USA (2014). In 2015, she participated in painting workshops with Rodolpho Parigi and Regina Parra and, in the same year, joined the Igarapé do Mariano artist residency (Galerie L'Amazonie, Manaus, AM), where she deepened her research on the environment.