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Delicately Carved Flora and Fauna by Efrain Almeida Recreate a Contemplative Brazilian Garden

19 Jul, 2024

This post was originally published on Colossal

Photo by Antônio More. All images courtesy of Oscar Niemeyer Museum, shared with permission

In O Jardim, Efrain Almeida cultivates the memories of his parents’ home in the backlands of Ceará, Brazil. Carved wooden creatures populate the gallery at Oscar Niemeyer Museum, appearing as if they could buzz and flutter across the space. Comprising about 40 sculptures, paintings, and embroideries, the exhibition reinterprets the intimate, contemplative garden Almeida enjoyed as a child.

Employing various mediums and materials, the artist first began working in wood while in his father’s studio. “I drew and made the silhouette, and he cut it on a bandsaw. Then I made the sculpture itself,” the artist says. The two had a difficult relationship, and Almeida found that this shared process was a fruitful point of connection. He adds:

This manufacturing brings the knowledge of the hand—even the way of holding the piece—and the heat that the hand transfers to the materials you work with. This hand can bring back a kind of ancestral memory. All of this, for me, has a relationship of ancestry and the transmission of knowledge through this type of slow and silent ritual that is manual work. Much of the communication that I begin to establish with my father is a silent kind of exchange.

Almeida frequently returns to the hummingbird as a motif in his work, and in this exhibition, the diminutive creature appears with its beak piercing a lush orange flower. Painted in purples, greens, and oranges, the iridescent bird symbolizes a connection to “rainbow(s), water, and the spirit of the forest,” the artist says, and is an ideal motif for the ways something so small can reveal a broader connection to place, nature, and belonging. “These moments,” he adds, “are very dear and important, in the sense of realizing that it is something bigger, that it is a vibration, that it is a connection with my history.”

O Jardim is on view through October 20, in Curitiba, Brazil.

 

a wooden hummingbird sculpture with its proboscis in an orange wood flower in a pot on a table

Photo by Antônio More

a wooden dog sculpture that appears to be licking a gallery wall

Photo by Eduardo Ortega

an emrboidered monarch on a gossamer periwinkle fabric

Photo by Eduardo Ortega

a wooden sculpture of a chick on a small platform

Photo by Eduardo Ortega

a wooden sculpture of a hungry bird in a nest

Photo by Eduardo Ortega

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Delicately Carved Flora and Fauna by Efrain Almeida Recreate a Contemplative Brazilian Garden appeared first on Colossal.

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ABB receives EPD status for gearless mill drive ring motor

ABB receives EPD status for gearless mill drive ring motor

ABB has gained Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) status for its Gearless Mill Drive (GMD) ring motor — technology used to drive large grinding mills in the mining industry.

An EPD is a standardised document that provides detailed information about the environmental impact of a product throughout its life cycle. Based on a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study, the EPD highlights ABB’s commitment to transparency, environmental responsibility and supporting customers in making informed decisions on sustainability in their supply chains.

ABB analysed the environmental impact of a ring motor across its entire life cycle from supply chain and production to usage and end-of-life disposal. The study was conducted for a ring motor of a semi-autogenous grinding (SAG) mill with an installed power of 24 MW and was based on a reference service life of 25 years.

“Sustainability is at the core of our purpose at ABB, influencing how we operate and innovate for customers,” said Andrea Quinta, Sustainability Specialist at ABB. “By earning the Environmental Product Declaration for our ring motor, we emphasise our environmental stewardship and industry leadership for this technology. We adhered to the highest standards throughout this process, as we do in the ABB Ring Motor factory every day. This recognition highlights to the mining industry what they are bringing into their own operations when they work with ABB.”

The comprehensive LCA was conducted at ABB’s factory in Bilbao, Spain, and was externally verified and published in accordance with international standards ISO 14025 and ISO 14040/14044. It will remain valid for five years.

The ring motor, a key component of the GMD, is a drive system without any gears where the transmission of the torque between the motor and the mill is done through the magnetic field in the air gap between the motor stator and the motor rotor. It optimises grinding applications in the minerals and mining industries by enabling variable-speed operation, leading to energy and cost savings.

The full EPD for the ABB GMD Ring Motor can be viewed on EPD International.

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