Gabriela Albergaria explores relationships between nature and humans, often focusing on care, healing, and our manipulation of the environment. She draws us into less noticed phases of lifecycles, like decomposition, or expansive geologic time that vastly exceeds human-centered experience. Through the reverent attention of her eye and hand, she magnifies the importance of pausing, rest, and restoration amid these seemingly fallow or inert periods. The meditative nature in her work generates a fuller appreciation of how phases of life and death travel in a reliant circle.

This exhibition features distinct bodies of work that unfold like the chapters of a book: observational drawings of nurse logs and glacier-moved boulders; wall-based installations and related works on paper featuring twigs she has collected from forests and parks; and a monumental cloth cascading into the gallery that Albergaria has sewn together from used washing sheets. Nurse logs are trunks and stumps of fallen trees that have died and are now the rich habitat for many organisms: mushrooms, microbes, insects and animals, and often new trees. From a human perspective, nurse logs are often unsightly or undesirable in comparison to a living tree. Yet for the rich ecosystem of a forest, the nurse log is the healer and facilitator of new life In a world in which we can so easily, with a click of a button, buy something freshly new and only single-use, Albergaria calls for this season of rest to bring about repair and quiet, aesthetic devotion to the afterlives of items.

The nurse tree drawings, which she calls Landscapes in repair, point us toward a throughline in Albergaria’s work: the idea of curing. Curing is, of course, a way to describe healing an illness, but it also refers to the preservation of organic materials, often food, to inhibit rapid decomposition and protect from microbial growth1. Curing is part of preparation before a long winter or a vast voyage. Albergaria cures certain found objects of the home and woods, preserving and protecting, mending and stitching them. She also takes from the common adage of the “nature cure”, that regular exposure to nature and outdoor space results in greater health, balance, and well-being.

An important, less public, part of her process is her time spent outdoors on walks in forests and parks, to explore, notice, and collect minor objects, like small twigs, for future use. Albergaria brings these dead and rotting sticks back to her studio. She washes and treats the small branches with sulfur free plasticine clay. Freezing the sticks for weeks further pauses the decomposition process. Through this ritualistic cleansing process, each wooden component takes on a bone-like appearance, like a relic honoring the fallen natural world. The sticks become modular units for installations of meandering pathways that Albergaria arranges on the wall. The lines generate a micro and macro perspective: individually these are minor, entirely overlooked, or useless landscape features. Yet repaired and assembled into linear form, they become horizon lines of an imagined landscape seen from a distance.

The repaired sticks are also fodder for drawings, as Albergaria closely studies and renders the small wooden pieces in two dimensions. These drawings recall the illustrations by John James Audubon (785-1851) or Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627)2. Tapping into the commonplace familiarity of naturalist drawing, Albergaria wants to entice a viewer who be unfamiliar with or even put off by conceptual or installation art. Yet she gives us two sides of the same coin, as she knowingly critiques naturalist drawing as part of the western worldview where the belief in empirical knowledge connects to belief in empire and dominance over nature and other people. The numbering system on each of her stick drawings link to methods of collecting, knowing, measuring, and categorizing natural specimens. However, the logic of her numbering “system” entirely breaks down when Albergaria presents dozens of these drawings together, absurdly out of order, amassed on a wall. While traditional naturalists’ drawings usually offer names and information about an animal or botanical species, the trail of knowledge stops with Albergaria’s drawings (no tree species or location named), making space for other kinds of reflection on these curious artefacts.

In related drawings Albergaria adds thin lines to her stick renderings to create rectangular or quasi-circular shapes that look like symbols of a hidden language. In connection to the neighboring artworks, these drawings provide another layer of insight into human-nature relationships. These drawings could signal the impulse to enclose landscapes with fences, hedges, and walls to assert ownership, exclude access, and extract monetary value from land3. Or these drawings accentuate the human desire to complete and draw connections across the nature’s fragmentary chaos.

The drawings of boulders in this show may seem distinct from the nurse logs and sticks. Yet for Albergaria, there are urgent and meaningful points of connection. The boulder she depicts now rests in present-day Brooklyn Botanical Garden. As the stenciled title on the drawing alludes, the stone was carried to this site by a glacier many millennia ago, left behind once the glacier retreated. Like the twig in the forest, this stone is but a fleck of dirt compared to the scale of a glacier. At the same time, when compared to the relatively short period of human existence on earth, this stone has existed in time scales beyond our comprehension. In these ways and more, Albergaria’s artworks bring significance to the insignificant and vastly widens our human-centered notions of time4.

The centerpiece of this exhibition, Textile remediation, offers one more chapter into Albregaria’s meditations on decomposition and repair. This thick expansive “blanket” is composed from cloths that are used in washing machines to absorb the tints of colored clothing (and thus not stain white clothing). Ever resourceful, Albergaria noticed that these cloths don’t naturally decompose after use. Incrementally amassing the sheets wash-by-wash, she began to stich them together like a quilt, inspired by the Japanese embroidery technique Sashiko that is used to recover clothes in poor condition and make them usable. These cloths vary in shades of soft gray and muted tans, traces of their stain-absorbing role. Cascading into the center of the gallery, the artwork resembles the aerial view of a “patchwork” of enclosed agricultural fields. The sewn lines of Textile Remediation also let us see the nearby stick installation anew, as the small twigs could be read as linear stitches on the wall.

As ideas of mending and care circulate throughout this exhibition, Albergaria calls for a seasonal of rest for repair. Winter is often the season for rest: we hibernate, may be less socially active or productive. Yet periods of dormancy and death are necessary. And repair is relentlessly needed and active. In a world in which we can so easily, with a click of a button, buy something freshly new and only single-use, Albergaria brings aesthetic reflection to the afterlives of items.

Gabriela Albergaria is a Portuguese artist who lives and works between Brussels and Lisbon. With a degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Oporto, she has been awarded numerous scholarships and artistic residencies, such as Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2000/2001) with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) / Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2004) / Villa Arson, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Nice (2008) / The University of Oxford Botanic Garden, in collaboration with The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford (2009/2010), Winter Workspace, Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center, New York (2012), Residency Unlimited, New York, USA (2015), Flora ars+natura, Bogotá, Colombia (2015), Gate 27, Istanbul (2024).

Gabriela Albergaria's work involves one territory: nature. The artist summons up themes around cultural, historical and economic relations with nature, in its Western tradition. In Gabriela Albergaria's works, these relationships have been enunciated and worked on from a reflection on the garden and the landscape (as designed, built and regulated natural spaces) or a reflection on the acclimatisation-displacement of plants that takes us back to extractive and intensive practices, in the broad context of the colonial project (colonisation of nature). More recently, her work has questioned the predation and destruction of ecosystems with a sense of urgency. Poetically re-enacting actions centred on the regeneration, recovery and reuse of used practices, materials and objects, reflecting on the issue of waste.

Her work is represented in the following collections: BESart Collection, Portugal; Coleção de Arte Contemporânea do Estado, Portugal; CAM, Centro de Arte Moderna Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Portugal; CAPC, Portugal; Coleção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Portugal; Coleção António Cachola, Portugal; Coleção da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Portugal; Coleção de Arte Portuguesa Fundação EDP, Portugal; Coleção Figueiredo Ferraz, Brazil; Coleção FLAD, Portugal; Coleção Fundação PLMJ, Portugal; Coleção José Olimpio, Brazil; Coleção Luis Augusto Teixeira de Freitas (Coleção de Serralves), Portugal; Coleção Norlinda e José Lima, Portugal; Colección Coca-Cola, Spain; Colección Navacerrada, Spain; Deutsche Bank Collection, Germany; Fundación Kablanc Otazu, Spain; Jorge M. Pérez Collection, USA; KFW bankenngrupe, Frankfurt; Lars Pahlman Collection, Finland; Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahía, Brazil; Museu Nacional dos Açores, Portugal; TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection.

Notes

1 “There’s an unspoken rule to our preserving: you shouldn’t have paid for the main ingredient. It should be part of a glut, otherwise unwanted or impossible to use, or should be foraged from the wild, where it would only decay without your intervention. You don’t have to look back many generations to see how this was an essential supplement to scarce fresh produce in winter months, although today it’s perhaps more of an affectation, an aspect of my personal culture that I’m reluctant to concede.” May, Wintering, 21.
2 Ed Simon, “The artist who ushered from medieval to modern”, January 6, 2025.
3 In the 18th century England, enclosure acts privatized once common lands and accelerated monoculture farming and single-animal husbandry. For more about the period of enclosure and its impact on landscape painting, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and ideology: the english rustic tradition, 1740-1860, University of California Press, 1989.
4 See Alan Weisman, The world without us, Picador, 2008.