ENG

I grew up in an environment which favored creation and curiosity. I was an only child in a farm, with an artist for a neighbor and parents who always encouraged creativity. I drew and painted from the moment I could hold a pencil, a brush. I told stories, wrote and illustrated books, inhabited a world of imagination and possibility. I raised small animals in terrariums, collected insects and leaves in albums, hoarded bones and nests that lay forgotten in cupboards. I have always been a collector. I enjoy observing and cataloguing things.

Even as a child I organized exhibitions of my works, sometimes spread around the house, sometimes hanging from trees, to be visited at night under the beam of flashlights. My mother had a collection of books from great artists, and the renaissance painters always captured my attention. I spent entire afternoons observing the images in the books, the details in the colors, the textures of cloth and lace. 

At nine I began to study drawing in the Youth Center for Visual Arts of Paraná. In my early teenage years I started having watercolor lessons. I fell in love with the technique, which stayed with me for years, from college to all but my latest works, when I started working with oil. 

In my first year of college, in the School of Music and Fine Art of Paraná, I worked on a scientific research on the history of watercolor, which took me deep into the biography of Albrecht Dürer. With a newly-awakened interest in scientific illustration, I took a course in the Center of Botanical Illustration of Paraná. 

In college, I dove deeper into poetic research and began to understand what I wanted to communicate with my work. The body was already present, and I was beginning to discover video as a tool to develop references of movement. It was a time of intense bodily exploration and expression.

In the last year of college I ventured into tattooing, and ended up going all in and making it my profession. I build a career and a name in the tattooing world, which estranged me from painting. My tenure in botanical illustration came in handy at this time, and helped me develop my work with botanical tattoos.

I ended my career as a tattoo artist between 2020 and 2023. At the same time I went back to painting, in addition to becoming a mother—which also guided my poetic research. From 2019 I’ve been working on a project which I plan to wrap up in 2024. It’s called “The mother—the history of four years and a roof of my own”.

My children renewed my desire to plunge back into myself, which has always been the main driving force behind my work. My research, which started in 2019, consisted in exploring the physical and emotional changes that come with motherhood, in dark paintings and somber tones that took me back to the renaissance books I studied as a child, and the carpet in my parents’ house. Among portraits of the pregnant and post-natal body, breastfeeding, harrowing moments of sleep deprivation and maternal psychosis, and warm exchanges between the bodies of mother and children, I bring to light a real and brutal outlook on what it’s like to become a mother in the flesh.

The first messy years of being a mother of two, amidst a pandemic and a divorce, were years in which my work slowed down to a crawl, cramped inside a routine that left little space to work without interruption and no space at all for creative leisure. 

In 2023, new possibilities of imagery arose in my research, bringing a necessary breath of fresh air to balance my inner chaos. I cast a curious and patient look on the lights that fell through the windows of my new house, painting it in dappled canvases of light and shadow. These lights emerged in a moment of intense recovery and had an enormous impact on the new margins I build for my life. I started to collect these moments of filtered light in my paintings, exploring the limits they draw between the figurative and the abstract. 

Currently I’m exploring my lights and looking for the points in which they meet motherhood.”

Tavia Jucksch, born in 1994, currently resides in Curitiba, Brazil.