Regina Duarte

Everything starts as a seed and has a great chance of bearing fruit. From a very young age, on the way back from school to home, I would collect leaves to dry in my books. In 1974, while breastfeeding my daughter, I painted my first oil painting. It was an enlarged copy of a family photo on an Easter Sunday. In January 2023, the impulse to observe and collect fallen leaves returned, this time as an overwhelming passion. Since then, I can no longer walk on streets and parks without looking at the trees thinking, 'Do I have these leaves?' I drastically reduced my contact with the phone, and my house turned into chaos with cardboard boxes, leaves, flowers, branches, dried mango pits, tangerine seeds, watermelon seeds, and everything else related to the life of trees.

I began to rely on the help of friends, neighbors, and family who couldn't resist bringing me a 'new little leaf,' saying, 'Before, I saw the leaves, but I didn't observe them in the same way as I do now.' The contagious nature of my process was incredibly stimulating. The next step was taken from the research process: cleaning, dehydrating, and gluing the material onto all types of recyclable support such as egg cartons, pizza boxes, shoeboxes, and so on. Wood glue was chosen under the concept that leaves, fruits, and flowers come from trees and are, therefore, in some way, wood. In each piece, my thoughts always went towards my fans and followers of @reginaduarte. Today, I see that I was led to choose the art of collage as an attempt to continue expressing myself to my audience. I have much to evolve.

The possibilities that collages offer are infinite .'Me and Nature: New Discoveries' – it's my current 'show.' Throughout this process, I discovered that my presence on the planet resembles that seed that grew, flourished, bore fruit, and now reveals, through this exhibition, nine months of fruitful mystery. We are born from a seed, become children, go through adolescence, mature, age, and wrinkle