laura nakel
is a visual designer,
architect and researcher
based in são paulo.
this portfolio is under
construction...
recent work experiences
exhibition designer
Bienal do Mercosul
Itinerância Xingu: Contatos - IMS
2024
design coordinator
Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty
2023
visual designer
Lumini
2023
master 's degree
Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning
University of São Paulo
2023
design coordinator
Sé gallery
2019–2023
Arcana Mundi —
Economy and Eccentricity
A rock is a perfect metaphor, an allegory in volume. When placed it’s sculptural limits beget a kind of artistic proposition — and when considered with reduced anthropomorphism and ungeologically — produce a ready-made analog to the causation and bounds of our attempts at the understanding of all things.
Here the sculptor has made no concessions; no attempts to curry favor with curators or collectors — pieces wholly outside discourse. And if pressed for an affiliate movement for these “sculptures” (i.e. Cubism, Mannerism, etc.)… perhaps Monism or Cosmogonism? Definitely not Conceptualism or Pataphysics — Actualism?
The analog? Well for sure it is 1:1. Weird; yes — a knot to be admired for it’s curves — not for untying. An emergent surface as thick as it’s mass.
Were it possible for the instances of our minds or world events to be mapped and dimensionally materialized, something similar to a rock would appear — areas of smoothness yielding to pockmarked particularities, density shifts and feathered explosions. What really is the shape of a boom town? A pilgrim’s journey? A section of jungle mayhem? A boring era? The silhouette of a father’s cold slap? The contours of a brief, intense friendship? Comfortably we perceive all of these things as ready to be integrated into ledgers or novels or timelines; but really they are queer crags and striations of unimaginable idiosyncrasy.
So yes, the reflective, reasonable yield of our mind has much symmetry (computation, cataloguing, narrativizing, etc.) but it’s actual shape is no shape, but unfolding chaos and singularity visible only to our particular time-scale. Our species-wide symmetries and quantizations are basically improvisations white-labeled onto directionless infinitude attempting the constant creation of navigable Dimension.
So, look intimately at a rock, walk around it, get up close to it, savor it’s complexion and composition as you would any painting or temple and see it as the faultless mirror that it is — a truly perfect sculpture.