Artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso is the recipient of the 2020 NSW Visual Arts (Established) Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded jointly by Create NSW and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in support of the work of artists based in New South Wales, gifting three fellows with a grant of up to $50,000.
Bogota-born Cardoso studied at Yale University in New York in 1997 before moving to Sydney where she is now based. Her practice encompasses sculpture, installation, performance and photography, exploring ideas around nature and its links to culture and science. Through the fellowship Cardoso will create a new series of large-scale digital portraits documenting various species of the Maratus, a spider native to Australia.
The artist is best known for her 2012 Museum of Copulatory Organs, a flea circus whose ‘performers’ and ‘stuntfleas’, trained by the artist included Harry Fleadini, an escape artist; Samson and Delilah, fleas that lifted cotton ball weights; Teeny and Tiny, tightrope walkers; Pipita and Pepon, a flea couple who pushed luminescent balls on a wire; and Brutus, who pulled a locomotive. Cardoso trained the fleas by rewarding them her blood.
19 March 2020
