Light Lines

Thoughts and writing from my month-long residency at PADA Studios in Barreiro, Portugal, in July of 2024. I was fortunate to be able to bring my mother and son with me, as well as be visited by a rotating presence of my sister’s, their families, and my husband. My main project was a site-specific fabric installation that was a stripe of sewn fabric running down a large set of concrete steps at the former site of the company CUF, where PADA is located.

There was something about the starkness of the light in Barreiro and the way it cast sharp, bright edges onto the urban landscape. The architecture of the city read in bleached out pastels of light pinks, yellows, whites, and greens, all edged against a rich red of terracotta roofs. In the month of July, we had mostly sunny days without much cloud cover.

Our Airbnb had a small courtyard attached to the front of the kitchen, walled in by a cement privacy fence and covered with bright green plastic turf. Mornings were cool, but as the sun shifted throughout the day the diagonal shadows cast across the courtyard grew smaller. Swaths of yellow light inched ever closer to the apartment steps, heating the turf so it became unwalkable and unplayable, at which point my Mom would shut the doors, lower the shades, and wait for the evening cool.

I began and ended my days with a fifteen-minute walk to the studio. I thought of the walk in four parts: a walk through an apartment complex and up and down the steps of an elevated bridge over a railroad track, a few winding blocks through a quiet, sleepy neighborhood punctuated by a café and bar, and then the shift into the residency complex, past a police station and down a shallow bricked hill. The walk had a rhythm of hills and steps, and whenever I ascended, I thought of a friend from college, a former cross-country runner, who would lean forward and run faster on hills to get over them more quickly. The visual sense I have from the walk is color. When I arrived home and began walking again through my neighborhood with Charlie, I remembered we don’t have colors like that in Ohio. My neighborhood is mostly greens of trees, browning grass, beige houses and grays of shaded sidewalks.

Over the summer Charlie became obsessed with toy cars. Before taking the trip, I had bought several matchbox cars at a thrift store, and my Mom added to the small collection by bringing a handful of cars from our family home with her to Portugal. We kept them in a small canvas drawstring pouch, put away at the end of the day and opened up and poured out by Charlie each morning. In Barreiro, everything became a track: the arms of the couch, the top of the TV stand, my legs, my mother’s legs, my husband’s legs, my sisters’ legs. Charlie would carefully take one car and move it to a stopping point, and, one by one, move the rest of the cars to the same position until they formed a line, repeating the task over and over.

One late afternoon during the residency, I was at our AirBnb with Charlie playing in one of the bedrooms. I laid on my stomach on the bed while Charlie stood next to me, arranging his cars so that they parked perpendicularly against my leg. When I moved my leg, the cars were left lined in a gentle curve, marking the shape of my thigh.

In her book In the Shadow of the Mountain, mountain climber Silvia Vasquez-Lavado describes the experience of summiting Mount Everest. She writes that the shadows cast by the peaks at such a scale appear as perfect triangles, being so large as to conform to the illusion of a vanishing point, like train tracks appearing to converge in the distance.

A few days before the residency finished, I completed the large-scale installation I had labored most of the residency: an 80-foot-long stripe designed to nest over a set of large stairs at the complex where PADA was located. For days I had measured, cut, ironed, and pushed fabric through the sewing machine. I completed the last panel in the evening when the studio was quiet. I left the length of fabric in the studio and made my way back home, up the hill, around the curve, ascending up, descending down. The sun was soft and setting, the air was cool. I felt entirely elated.

Sources:

Vasquez-Lavado, Silvia. In the Shadow of the Mountain: A Memoir of Courage. United States: Henry Holt and Company, 2022, 297.