ERASURE | An introduction to the winter exhibition by assistant curator Eleanor Clarke

Earlier this year, it was announced that we had reached our first climate “tipping point,” a threshold beyond which severe environmental damage becomes irreversible. Warnings that the Amazon rainforest could collapse and that coral reefs may never recover, underscore the need to urgently address environmental issues. This devastating milestone arrives on the eve of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, which lies at the heart of the Amazon. 

Against this backdrop, the exhibition ERASURE brings together three international artists, Laís Amaral, Solange Pessoa and Dana Awartani, whose diverse practices, spanning painting, sculpture, installation and moving image, weave together environmental consciousness and cultural memory. Each approaches the land not as a passive subject, but as a living body, wounded, but capable of healing and desperately in need of care.  

Laís Amaral, Photo Victor Debeija | Laís Amaral, Untitled, 2023, Photo Hugard & Vanoverschelde.

In her first institutional exhibition in Europe,  Laís Amaral presents painterly compositions that evoke complex topographies, their surfaces marked by contour lines and incisions resembling both geological and bodily scars. Her distinctive scraping technique, using tweezers and combs, becomes an act of erasure and excavation, echoing Brazil’s deforested landscapes and the struggles of Afro-Brazilian communities whose cultural traditions remain rooted in these environments. 

Solange Pessoa. Portrait by João Vargas | Solange Pessoa, Nihil Novi Sub Sole, 2019–2021, Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia, Photo João Vargas. 

Solange Pessoa, one of Brazil’s foremost living sculptors, draws from the landscape and cultural history of her native Minas Gerais. Since the 1990s she has worked with organic materials such as moss, feathers, clay and soapstone, shaping them into forms that seem both ancient and alive. This closeness to the earth gives her work a tactile, almost sentient quality, which she describes as its “telluric power”. Together with Amaral, her practice expresses our profound human interconnectedness with nature. 

Dana Awartani, I Went Away and Forgot You (2017) © Dana Awartani, courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery.

Dana Awartani’s terrain is of a different kind: that of the built environment. A timely and powerful critique runs through her work, in which she confronts the destruction of cultural heritage sites across the Middle East due to war and conflict. Like Pessoa, she engages with craft traditions and centuries-old practices, drawing on the language of geometric abstraction to explore themes of nature, sustainability and cultural preservation.  

At Goodwood Art Foundation, both the landscape and exhibition programme reflect a commitment to fostering deeper connections between people and the environment. Beyond our own landscape, the environmental challenges we face are global, urgent, and inseparable from cultural realities. Through their distinct yet convergent practices, Amaral, Pessoa and Awartani offer timely and poetic reflections on how nature and culture are connected. Through carving, scraping and sweeping, these artists transform acts of erasure into gestures of care, reminding us that protect the earth is also to preserve the histories and identities it sustains. 

Written by assistant curator Eleanor Clarke.