BELLA CARDIM

Measuring tapes are woven into an unfinished structure, transforming instruments of bodily measurement into a fragile and unstable surface. The work examines how standards are constructed, repeated, and absorbed by the body, while the incomplete weave suggests the possibility of resisting and rewriting them.

Family recipes printed on fabric are held inside vintage wooden birdcages, some trapped, some suspended, and others appearing to escape, while a handwritten red ribbon carries phrases inherited from childhood. The cages become metaphors for emotional confinement, revealing how food can operate simultaneously as love, nourishment, inherited obligation, and a fragile possibility of release.

A white table bearing the question “What are you hungry for?” is surrounded by blank porcelain plates waiting to be inscribed. Visitors are invited to write directly onto them, expanding hunger beyond food and transforming the table into a collective space for desires, absences, memories, and emotional needs.

I Won’t Tell is an interactive installation that invites viewers to reflect on their relationship with food when they are alone. Through a peephole, visitors encounter a question and are invited to leave anonymous responses on sticky notes, transforming private eating habits into a space for collective confession, where shared secrets reveal patterns, fears, and desires surrounding the act of eating.

Restrained is a sculptural work that transforms the sensation of being shaped and contained by clothing into rigid plaster forms bound with red thread. Drawing on culinary techniques and visual references associated with food, the work examines control, vulnerability, and the pressures imposed on the body and its image.

Sugar Blues is a cyanotype series that uses sugar as both subject and metaphor, tracing the fragile line between sweetness and dependency, comfort and control. Rooted in childhood memory and emotional hunger, the work examines how learned desire and the quiet power of sugar continue to shape our bodies, emotions, and everyday lives.

Dysmorphia is a photographic series in which fruits and vegetables stand in for human bodies, magnified through lenses until their natural forms become distorted. Inspired by body dysmorphia, the work questions idealized standards of beauty and examines how repeated looking, technological mediation, and the pursuit of perfection can estrange us from our own bodies.

Exposed is a photographic series that uses the visual language of X-rays to reveal the internal structures of fruits and vegetables. By exposing what usually remains beneath the surface, the work reflects on hidden pain and the tension between what the body reveals and what it learns to conceal.