Jacira Baptista

"I come from a family of sculptors, as my grandfather was a renowned artist and a professor at Recife's School of Fine Arts. People referred to his house as the "house of sculptures;" in the garden alone there were four of his great sculptures. When I was a little girl, I used to play at making mud sculptures at my grandfather's studio.

"Many years went by before my artistic roots began to give fruit. I got married, became a widow, and got married again. In the 1980s I took a course at Maria Thereza Vieira's studio and discovered the different techniques for sculpting and design and thus 'encountered' the modern style – quite a leap from the academic style that distinguished my family's work.

"My work is very personal, for it comes from my emotional subconscious. It's easy for me to create a piece from an idea, but I've always been resistant to the realism of classical art. I am predominantly an artist of what is feminine, maybe as a result of the abundance of female images in grandfather's studio. Sculpting male images was sort of a taboo, for as a little girl I wasn't allowed to see the figures of nude men that my uncles sculpted in a classic style.

"I've been experiencing an intensively creative period since the 1990s, and I've been participating in several exhibitions. Of these, I regard as the most important the one held at Rio de Janeiro's Museum of Modern Art. For this exhibition, I presented three pieces honoring Zumbi, king of the Palmares, the biggest most important black hero in Brazilian culture. I've also exhibited at the Stuttgart Cultural Center in Germany."