Mar Alves

Participant

Mar Alves is a visual artist whose work arises from the need to tell stories. Often autobiographical, her practice explores the intersections between rural traditions, memory, and imagination. Moving between the ethnographic and the sensorial, she approaches art as a space of listening and resonance.
Her recent projects expand into research-based practice, exploring visual languages within rural and nature-centric communities and the ways in which gesture, materiality, and oral transmission embody forms of care, resistance, and belonging. Through this lens, she investigates how knowledge is preserved, reimagined, and transformed through acts of making and sharing.

Themes such as the precarity of agricultural labor, the sumptuousness of religious ritual, and the cultural fragmentation of folklore stories shape her visual language — one that exists between figuration and an abstraction of organic and familiar symbolism.

Combining painting and sculpture with unconventional materials, she creates works that trace narratives both personal and communal. This pendular movement between research and expression allows her to explore the emotional and symbolic resonances that root her work in place and ancestry, while nurturing an ongoing desire to reconnect with the ecosystem that sustains her stories.