The Imagination Born from the Earth: Vale do Jequitinhonha

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From Utility to Artistic Expression

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In the heart of the Jequitinhonha Valley, in the village of Santana do Araçuaí, the tradition of clay dolls emerged from a deeply human necessity: the desire to express and reveal the beauty that lives within each of us.

Amid the arid landscape — where drought has long been a constant presence — water had to be carried from streams to homes in clay vessels, sustaining everyday life. Clay became a guardian: a womb that held and preserved water, allowing each drop to sustain the lives that endured there. Pots, pans, and water jars were more than utilitarian objects — they were instruments of survival and continuity.

Yet within this harsh daily reality, there was something beyond necessity. There was imagination.

In the 1970s, the hands of Izabel Mendes da Cunha — shaped by the traditions of her mother and generations of women before her — began to shift clay from the purely utilitarian realm into the symbolic. The pot became a human silhouette. The lid of the water jar transformed into a head. And thus, the iconic dolls of the Jequitinhonha Valley were born.

Function expanded into language. The material remained the same: clay, hand-built techniques, pigments extracted from the earth. What changed was the gesture. Imagination moved through tradition without breaking it. Art liberated itself while remaining deeply rooted in its ancestral origins.

What had once been an object of use became a symbol.
What had once been necessity became the cultural expression of a territory.

With generosity, Dona Izabel taught her children, neighbors, and friends. Tradition became a living school. Each artist began to recreate this visual language in their own way, maintaining a bond with the earth and with the technique while affirming their own identity. In this way, one of the most recognized traditions of Brazilian folk art was consolidated.

The works gathered in this exhibition do not belong to a single moment in time. They are dolls from different temporalities brought together in coexistence, forming a collective body that traverses generations of figurative ceramics from the Jequitinhonha Valley.

Here, past, present, and continuity coexist.

The exhibition brings together some of the earliest dolls created during the formation of this artistic language — when clay first began to assume human form — alongside contemporary creations that expand the tradition without breaking from its origins. What we see is not an evolutionary line, but a living continuity of the creative gesture, constantly reinvented.

From the creations of master artist Dona Izabel to her earliest students, such as Placidina — during the period when the dolls still carried few colors — later followed by names such as Maurina, João Pereira, his children Amadeu, Glória Maria, Maria Madalena, and later artists such as her granddaughter Andréia, Aneli, Ana, Alice, Augustto, as well as influences extending to artisans throughout the region, including Zezinha and Irene, this exhibition reveals a living lineage.

By bringing together different eras within the same space, the exhibition proposes a reading in which tradition is not something fixed or confined to the past. Tradition is movement. Each piece carries the marks of its own time — of living conditions, social transformations, and personal experiences — while simultaneously remaining in dialogue with those that came before.

What we celebrate here is not only the dolls of the Jequitinhonha Valley, but the Flame that moves across generations. This art is not an isolated point in history; it is a continuous thread connecting masters and apprentices, permanence and reinvention.

As both curator and artist within this lineage, I present this body of work not merely as an aesthetic organization, but as a living testimony of cultural continuity. Each piece exhibited here is a fragment of a collective energy, an expression of our people and our land.

Imagination is not born separated from reality.
It emerges from matter itself — from scarcity transformed into creative power.

The imagination born from the earth is gesture, identity, and memory materialized in clay — and it remains alive, with the Flame carried forward through each new generation.

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Curated by Augustto Ribeiro